Depending on your fitness goals building muscle and strength can be different for many people. For example, some people may want to increase their muscular endurance but some may want to have explosive strength. Therefore, people’s training goals are very important in discussing nutrition, exercises, repetitions and sets. Let’s explore some of these training styles.
Muscular endurance
Muscular endurance is defined as the ability to continuously contract your muscles against resistance for a prolonged period of time. This has numerous health benefits and especially good for people who engage in sports. For instance, professional cyclists needs really good muscular endurance in their quadriceps and hamstrings in order to cycle many miles. You can practice muscular endurance in various ways such as weights and Aerobic activity. When training with weights, it’s recommended to do between 12-25 repetition with very short rest periods (under a minute). With weights it’s suggested to only do 2-3 sets of an exercise due to the amount of volume.
Muscle hypertrophy
Muscle hypertrophy is the process of making microscopic tears in your muscles and over time the muscle build back bigger and stronger. This type of training is mainly for bodybuilding so creating a aesthetic body. The best way to incorporate this training is through the combination of compound and isolation exercises. Compound exercise is training multiple muscles at the same time whereas isolation is training a single muscle at a time. These training methods has it’s own advantages so incorporating both is beneficial for building muscle. In order to train muscle hypertrophy you should do an 8-12 repetitions for 3-4 sets. You should also have more rest than muscular endurance as you want to increase size so having 2-3 minutes rest per set is optimal.
Explosive strength
Explosive strengths is about exerting maximal force in an exercise. This training is normally performed by powerlifters with the goal of being as strong as possible. This is not about building muscle but becoming strongest usually focusing on compound lifts such as deadlifts, squats and bench press. To train explosive strength you need to lift over 80% of your 1 rep max and for 3-5 reps. Powerlifters often do various sets usually around 5 as most beneficial. Furthermore, they also require the greatest amount of rest due to exerting the most amount of effort. This is 5-7 minutes per set to get the recovery they need for the following set.
Therefore, depending on your training goals there is a method that suits you best.