Can you build muscle with light weights? The surprising truth behind what it takes to build muscle

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As a garage gym owner (AKA garden shed) studies around building muscle and strength with minimal equipment has always fascinated me. How heavy do I need to lift to see results? How many sets should I do? How many reps should I aim for? Should I lift to failure? But what if I have an injury and I can’t lift to failure, will I still see results?

So. many. Questions.

No space or budget? No problem.

A recent study shows that you can still build arms like Arnie even with light weights. OK maybe not quite like Arnie, but you don’t need to benchpress a car to see some results.

To shape up your body and build muscle, the weight you lift doesn’t really matter, as long as you follow these three golden rules.

The golden rules of muscle hypertrophy

First, the weight should be at least 30% of your one-rep max – that’s the heaviest weight you can lift for one rep of an exercise.
Second, the overall volume of your workout (reps x sets x weight x training sessions) should be the same as if you were lifting moderate to heavy weights.
And third, you gotta push it till you can’t lift another rep with good form (concentric failure) or till you think you can’t do another rep (volitional failure).

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What about strength?

When it comes to getting stronger though, it’s a bit more complex. Let's say you're bench pressing or squatting with 40 or 50 percent of your max, you can't expect the same strength gains as you would with 80 or 90 percent. But hey, even if you're only lifting lighter weights, you'll still get somewhat stronger and that strength will be useful in real life too.

So, no need for the all-or-nothing mentality here, because something will always result in more than nothing.

If blood sugar is a concern of yours, you’ll like this…

After you eat, about 80 percent of the sugar from your meal goes into your muscles, where it's stored as glycogen for later use. And guess what? The more reps you do, the more glycogen your muscles use and the more it needs to replace, which means better control of your blood sugar.

Side note: this is also one of the reasons why I encourage my athletes that participate in high intensity movement to drink carbs when they train, because the faster you move, the faster your tank gets drained.

But here’s the thing, if you are using the lower rep range as a strategy for glycemic control, you have to do a high volume of work—like multiple sets with a lot of reps—to tap into this.

So, in other words, the lighter the weight, the harder you gotta work to get those results.

We default to under-loading

Here's an interesting fact from another recent study. When people were asked to choose their own weights for exercises, they usually selected about 53% of their max weight. That's a bit lighter than most trainers would typically recommend, but it tells us something important: folks of all experience levels, not just beginners, tend to under-load their weights.

Age and gender affect this too. Older folks and females tend to go for lighter weights, and folks generally pick heavier weights for their upper-body than lower-body exercises.

A note though…

Even if lighter weights seem safer, every workout has some risk. Higher volumes and faster speeds can uncover hidden weaknesses, so we need to ramp things up slowly and carefully.

So, the bottom line? Light or heavy, fast or slow, doesn’t matter as much as you’d think. What matters is that you're showing up, putting in the work, and pushing yourself a little more each day. Keep that in mind, and you're already winning!

Conclusion

The good news is that you can build muscle with light weights and minimal equipment, you just need to make sure that you lift enough volume, take it to near failure and work within the 30% of your 1RM. If that doesn’t sound like much, remember that taking your muscles to near failure at lower weight takes a lot out of your body. However when it comes to strength, the research is still nuanced (but what research isn’t), so as far as that subject is concerned, you’d still need to lift relatively heavy to see an increase in strength.