Here's How Many Reps You Should Do, Depending on Your Fitness Goals
When you lift a weight, how many times should you lift it? Supposedly, there’s a correct “rep range” to use to build strength, and a different rep range to build muscle size, or endurance, or to “tone.” But how much of the oft-repeated wisdom is true? Not as much as you’d think.
What are reps and sets?
Just so we’re on the same page here: if you pick up a dumbbell and do eight curls before putting the weight down, you have just done one set of eight reps. (Rep is short for repetition.)
Typically a workout will call for several sets of each exercise, separated by a rest period of a minute or two, or by another exercise. Typical schemes include three sets of 10, four sets of eight to 12, or five sets of five. These are often written in the format [sets]x[reps], so 5 x 5 would be five sets of five reps each, and 3 x 10 would be three sets of 10.
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There are many factors you might consider (or that an experienced trainer might include when writing your program) when deciding how many reps you should do, but often people try to stick with the “rep range” that they are told makes sense with their goals.
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What are the traditional rep ranges?
Here’s what you’ll hear from many trainers, influencers, and online resources. Beware that you need to take these with a grain of salt, and I’ll explain why in a minute:
- Smaller numbers of reps, like one to five, are said to be for strength.
- Medium numbers, like six to 12, are said to be for building muscle size.
- If you’re a woman and want to “tone,” you may be told that eight to 12, or maybe 10 to 15, will give you definition while keeping your muscles from growing too much. (You may notice this overlaps with the range for muscle growth.)
- A rep range of 15 or more is usually held to be for muscular endurance.
The exact numbers will vary depending on who you ask, but no matter how you slice it, something isn’t adding up. If you do 10 reps, are you building muscle size, or are you keeping your muscles “toned”? It can’t be both—unless 10 can work for either goal, in which case the number of reps isn’t what determines the outcome. (Hmm…)
It’s also wrong to think that strength and muscle growth are completely separate from each other, with different ways to build each. So let’s go over some practical advice for deciding what rep ranges you should actually work with.
Strength and muscle size don’t (always) require different training
Beginners in the gym often spend a lot of effort figuring out the “optimal” routine to meet their goals. But as I’ve said before, optimal is optional. Getting the details right is not nearly as important as getting the big picture right.
And the big picture for most beginner and intermediate lifters is that pretty much everything will build both strength and muscle size. You can lift in the “strength” range and still build muscle. You can lift in the “size” range and find yourself gaining strength.
You can read a deep dive on this idea here. The author, powerlifter, and coach Greg Nuckols does conclude that lower numbers of reps (like 1-5) have a bias toward strength, and higher reps (15+) have a bias toward muscular endurance.
But for growing muscles in size, just about anything works. He summarizes: “The ‘hypertrophy [size gaining] range’ of roughly six to 15 reps per set may produce slightly better results per unit of time invested than low rep and high rep work. However, on the whole, the advantage you get from working in the hypertrophy range isn’t nearly as big as people seem to think; maybe a ~10-15% advantage per unit of effort invested at most.”
He recommends training in a variety of rep ranges if you want bigger or more defined muscles, rather than using the same narrow range every time. That’s pretty much the consensus among good trainers, anyway: most effective training programs have a mix of high- and low-rep exercises. That’s because each rep range has its pros and cons when it comes to particular exercises and purposes, not just a person’s overall goals.
When to use low reps (1-5)
This is traditionally the strength range, and to be fair, it is a good rep range to work on strength. Here, I’m using “strength” to mean increasing the amount of weight you can lift, even if you can only lift it once.
For strength
If you want to show off in front of your friends by benching more than them, or if you want to enter a weightlifting competition and place well, or if you want to achieve your first pullup, you want to work on strength.
This means you need to practice with heavy weights. A w