Three Months of Low Reps: The Experiment That Almost Cost Me My Progress

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It was somewhere between month six and month eight of training, I weighed eighty kilograms at most, definitely not more, and everything was going well. My lifts were climbing week after week, I could feel the progress, and I had no plateau, no frustration, nothing pushing me toward change. Then one day I came across something online that caught my attention, and I thought it might be worth trying something new, even though what I was already doing worked without a single complaint.

I Changed Something That Wasn’t Broken

I read that if I wanted to speed up muscle gain, I should drop the eight to twelve rep range I had been using since the beginning and switch to three to six, six to eight reps with heavier weight. It was supposed to give a new stimulus, more strength, faster results. I didn’t have a specific problem I was trying to solve, I was just curious whether it would actually work better.

So I started. Where I used to lift, say, seventy kilograms in my usual range, I was now pushing eighty five in the lower rep range. On paper it looked impressive. The weights kept climbing week after week, and for a while I genuinely thought I had found something better than what I was doing before.

The problem was that I didn’t feel what I used to feel after a workout. There was none of that deep muscular burn, that sense the muscle had actually worked to its limit. There was only the feeling that I couldn’t lift the bar one more time, which is a completely different thing. And after three months of this approach, that was when I truly hit a wall for the first time, despite lifting heavier than I ever had before. My ego was growing, but the visible and physical results weren’t keeping up.

Why More Kilograms Didn’t Mean More Muscle

When I looked back at this later, I understood what had actually happened, and the research on this is fairly clear. A study by Schoenfeld and colleagues from 2017, published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, compared low load and high load training in well trained men (Schoenfeld et al., 2017, JSCR, https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/fulltext/2017/12000/strength_and_hypertrophy_adaptations_between_low_.31.aspx). Both groups gained similar amounts of muscle mass, but the group training with heavier loads and fewer reps saw significantly greater gains in maximal strength, while the group training with lighter loads and higher reps gained more muscular endurance.

That explains exactly what I felt. My body was adapting mostly at the neurological level, learning to generate more force with the same weight, but it wasn’t building as much muscle tissue as it had at higher reps. I was growing on paper, not in the mirror. It wasn’t a mistake in execution, it was simply a rep range mismatched to my actual goal, which is mass, not raw strength.

I Went Back to Eight to Twelve, to Failure, Every Time

After three months I went back to what I had been doing from the start, eight to twelve reps on most exercises, always to muscular failure. I’ve also stuck to one technical habit I worked out on my own, based on what gave me the best sense of the muscle actually working: an explosive concentric phase and a slow, controlled eccentric phase. On push movements, like chest press, I push the weight away fast and bring it back slowly. On pull movements, like back exercises, I pull fast and lower slowly.

I wondered for a long time whether this approach to tempo actually had any scientific basis, or if it was just something that felt right to me. It turns out there’s decent support for it. A meta-analysis by Schoenfeld, Ogborn, and Krieger from 2015, published in Sports Medicine, examined the effect of different repetition tempos on muscle growth. The results showed that hypertrophic outcomes are similar across tempos ranging from half a second to eight seconds per repetition. In other words, as long as I’m not moving at an extremely slow pace, my style of an explosive concentric phase paired with a controlled eccentric doesn’t work against muscle building, it’s simply one of many approaches that hold up.

Why Training to Failure Makes Sense for Me Right Now

What surprised me most while researching for this post was learning that training to muscular failure works differently depending on training experience. A large meta-analysis by Grgic, Schoenfeld, and colleagues from 2021, published in the Journal of Sport and Health Science, reviewed fifteen studies comparing training to failure against training short of failure. Overall, no significant difference was found between the two approaches. But in the subgroup of resistance trained individuals specifically, training to failure produced a significantly greater hypertrophic effect than training without reaching failure.

I’ve been training for over two years now, so I fall exactly into the group for which pushing to the limit has a scientific basis, not just a subjective feeling. This also explains why during my first few months of training, when I was still a beginner, I probably would have grown at a similar rate regardless of whether I finished a set at exhaustion or not. At that stage the body responds to almost any stimulus. That changes over time.

It’s Not the Rep Range That Breaks a Plateau

There’s one more study that changed how I now think about breaking through stagnation. Damas and colleagues in 2019, in the Journal of Applied Physiology, examined what happens when training variables such as load, number of sets, contraction type, and rest intervals are systematically changed session to session, compared to a standard, consistent progressive program. The group using the varied program generated more total training volume and a slightly higher rate of muscle protein synthesis, but the final increase in muscle cross sectional area was the same as in the group following the standard, consistent program. Even more striking, the differences between individual people were about forty times greater than the differences caused by the training protocol itself.

That was the moment I understood my own experiment from a few months earlier much more clearly. I didn’t change my rep range because I had a good reason rooted in how my body was responding, I changed it because I had read somewhere that it might help. And as this research shows, it isn’t the manipulation of variables that matters most, it’s who you are and how consistently you train within the range that actually works for your goal. This connects to something I wrote about before, that consistency beats a perfect plan, even when that perfect plan sounds more scientific on paper.

Recovery and a Growing Appetite

I train three times a week on a push and pull split, push on Tuesday, pull on Thursday, push again on Saturday. With that schedule, every muscle group gets five to six days of rest before I load it to failure again, and so far that’s been more than enough for full recovery. I haven’t had any injury directly tied to training to failure, aside from a hernia that, according to my doctor, likely had a developmental origin from before birth rather than a training related one, which I wrote about separately.

One thing I’ve noticed clearly since training this consistently is my appetite. The more and the harder I train, the hungrier I get, especially for carbohydrates. After training I always reach for a protein source, most often in the form of a high carb weight gainer, which does a good job of filling me up after a session where I’ve genuinely left everything on the gym floor. Personally I use Optimum Nutrition Serious Mass, but any similar product with a comparable profile should serve the same purpose. I’ve also started tracking this more carefully with the Yazio app, which syncs with my Apple Watch and shows how much I’m actually burning, which helps me make sure I’m eating enough protein and calories to match what I need, similar to what I described earlier when tracking protein to gain ten kilograms.

Looking back at all of this, my three month experiment with low reps wasn’t wasted time, it simply taught me that curiosity and the desire to try something new aren’t always good enough reasons to change something that already works. Sometimes the best conclusion an experiment can give you is confirmation that you were right from the start.

This post reflects my personal experience only and is not medical or nutritional advice. Please consult a professional before making changes to your training or diet.