How does the body know which is which and why does it react this way? What physical changes occur in the muscle when you’re building strength?
In: Biology
They both build muscle, and they are both important to proper weight training.
They just train different aspects of the muscle, high rep/low intensity increases the muscle’s endurance
While low rep/high intensity increases the muscles “maximum power”
Having one without the other isn’t very useful, and most good work out plans use a mixture of both
Ever see dark meat and light meat on a chicken or turkey?
Dark meat is like the high-rep low intensity stuff. Because the chicken walks a lot.
White meat is like the low-rep high intensity stuff. Because the chicken doesn’t flap the wings so often.
Do we have dark meat and white meat? Yes, but they are bundled together – any one of our muscles is a mix of both. You would need a microscope to see the different types of muscle combined together. Kind of like pork doesn’t have white/dark meat separately. That being said, muscles in your back might have more of a dark meat component and on your biceps might have more of a white meat component.
It actually turns out that our “white meat”, those muscle fibers, they’re BIG. So if we train them, our muscles also get BIG. Train them with high intensity, low reps. These muscles are super strong but they tire out really quickly.
Now our dark meat, those muscle fibers are SMALL. Train those with low-intensity/high reps, they’ll still be pretty small. But what they’re really good at is endurance, they can just keep going.
High reps (lighter weight) cause more damage (micro tears) to muscle tissues, leads to more muscle repair during rest -> big muscles
Low reps (with heavier weight) train the nervous system to recruit more muscle fibers to work for you -> strength. But since the volume (set x reps x weight) is lower, you don’t get as much micro tears compared to high reps.
Ideally you’d do both.
P.S. this is all bro-science that has been passing on for generations.
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