When trying to create an effective fat loss workout, one question many of you may ask yourself is whether or not it’s going to be best to use a high rep scheme or a low rep scheme.
Many people initially get the feeling that utilizing a higher rep range will lead to greater results since it will help them burn more calories during the workout. Furthermore, often they feel that if they use low reps and lift heavier, this will make them larger, which goes directly against their goals of getting thinner.
But, is this really the case?
In order to determine the optimal rep range for your fat loss workout, there are a variety of factors you should be considering.
Performance Related Goals
First, you should always consider what your performance related goals are, if you have any.
For example, if your goal is to develop strength for a particular sport you participate in, a fat loss workout program that has you working in the twelve rep range isn’t going to accomplish this goal all that well.
In that case, that’s not the right direction for you to head.
Likewise, if you are say a marathon runner and need your muscles to become adapted at utilizing oxygen and clearing away lactic acid better, then a higher rep scheme can be a smart move.
Carbohdyrate Intake on the Fat Loss Diet
Next up, you need to assess what your total carbohydrate intake is on your diet. If you’re on a very low carbohdyrate diet, you aren’t going to be able to do a great deal of volume with your weight training workouts otherwise you will deplete the muscle glycogen stores and eventually see a declining performance level (not to mention you’ll feel like a walking zombie the rest of the day).
High volume weight lifting and low carb diets do not mix well at all. In fact, I’d go so far to say they are enemies. You do not want to create this combination with your program.
Workout Split Preference
Next up, look at your workout split preference. Are you doing a full body workout? An upper/lower split? Or, perhaps you’re still dead set on the body part split type of workout.
This too will affect your total volume. If you’re doing body part split workouts, lifting so many exercises within the high rep range for so many days out of the week is going to become very taxing on the body and you will very likely start seeing problems result.
This can be in the form of muscle mass loss, decreased metabolic rate, increased injury frequency, or a combination of the above.
When on fat loss diets especially, rest is key.
Types of Exercises You’re Doing
Finally, the last factor to consider is the type of exercises you’re doing.
If you’re doing a session with squats, deadlifts, chest press, bicep curls, and dips for instance, you may be able to use higher rep ranges on the curls and dips, but for the core lifts, the lower rep range is usually going to optimal.
Why?
More compound movements mean more muscle fibers will be recruited within each rep, which means you can lift a heavier weight and also, that you will become fatigued faster.
You will get so many more benefits though from lifting heavy with the core lifts than lifting lighter in higher rep ranges, so you’d be silly to make this mistake.
So, be sure you assess these factors when coming up with your fat loss workout program. While you can use high reps periodically throughout your training to give the body something new and shock it, I wouldn’t recommend high reps all the time for just about anyone.
One thing to really remember here with regards to lifting and fat loss is that getting larger muscles is a function of diet mostly – if you’re on a diet, you are not getting any bigger; trust me on this.
You can’t build new muscle when not enough fuel is coming in to even maintain your weight (which is the essential structure of a fat loss diet in the first place).
Secondly, by lifting heavy, you will ramp the metabolic rate up more after the workout, so that in itself will also help further along fat loss.
So, the best place to aim for most people (performance goals aside) when constructing a fat loss workout will be somewhere between 5 and 10 reps.
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