Should You Train With Higher or Lower Reps?

What the science says and how to apply it to your training

“Should I train with higher reps or lower reps to build muscle?”
“I’ve heard higher reps will help you tone your muscles more.”
“Isn’t it true that lower reps with heavier weight will make me bulky?”

These are all common things I’ve heard or been asked as a coach and even believed as a younger lifter.

If you hang around any local gym for long enough, you’re bound to hear these ideas said as if they were hard facts. It’s no wonder folks are confused about the topic of high vs. low reps.

It can be especially confusing because you’ll likely get a wide range of rep schemes from different programs and coaches. And if any coach or system is rigidly attached to one protocol being “the best,” it can add even more confusion.

So, the question remains:

Which is better? High reps or low reps?

As with any question, specifics matter. Mainly, which is better for what?

Most people tend to ask this question in regard to body composition and strength. The oversimplified answers are as follows.

For building muscle, neither is inherently superior within a large range of about 5–30 reps.

For building strength, lower reps are generally better than higher reps, especially at the extreme ends. For example, heavy singles will be much better for developing max strength than sets of 30 will ever be.

These are, as I mentioned, oversimplified answers. Let's dig deeper into this topic and see how you can best apply it to your training.

What Does The Science Say?

There have been plenty of studies on this topic. Enough for multiple meta-analyses to be done (that’s just a review of relevant studies on a topic.) This one by Schoenfeld et al. (1) in 2017 gave us a good insight into how to understand these comparisons in a broad sense.

For building muscle, there was no real difference between high reps and low reps. There wasn’t even a real skew towards favouring one over the other.