Can You Build Muscle With Light Weights? The Science Says Yes!

Since the early 20th century, building muscle has been a fascination amongst all people across age groups. Bodybuilders have perfected this with different training styles, focusing on hypertrophy.

The Science Behind Bodybuilding

Bodybuilding does get a bad rap when it comes to the use of performance enhancers, particularly within the IFBB. This league hosts the Olympia and is the most popular competitive bodybuilding league. However, there are natural leagues where you are tested for using performance enhancements. The competitors in those leagues can build impressive physiques naturally, and that should be your focus. Across all leagues, all bodybuilders focus on one training style, hypertrophy. 

Hypertrophy

The focus of hypertrophy is to keep a muscle under tension for an extended period. Let's say you’re squatting, it should take you between 20 and 45 seconds to complete your set of 6-12 reps, allowing the squat to hold tension in your quads and glutes through each rep. Due to the constant tension, the muscle is forced to adapt, resulting in bigger muscles. 

Time Under Tension

Taking a deeper dive into hypertrophy, we must consider the time you’re in set. The “Time Under Tension”, or TUT, is the time in which it takes you to complete your set. As mentioned above, the sweet spot for this is between 20 and 45 seconds with the 30-second mark being the perfect amount of time. To make this possible, you need to take into consideration the two movement phases.

Positive Movement Phase

The positive phase of any movement in your training is when you’re bringing your muscle into a flexed (or shortened) position. Going back to our squat example, the positive phase would be when you are standing up. This phase is almost always going to start relatively fast and as you go through your set you start to slow down as your body uses energy and the muscle gets closer to failure. 

Negative Movement Phase

The negative phase of any movement in your training is when you’re bringing your muscle into the stretched position. Continuing our squat example, the negative phase would be when you are going from the standing position down into the squatted position. It’s during this phase that you extend the time you are in set. During the negative phase, you want to keep the time it takes you to get into the stretched position between 3 and 4 seconds. 

The Working Set

Once you’ve gotten warm for any particular movement, it’s time to dive into your working sets. Within these sets, you will put together the concepts from the positive and negative movement phases. 

• Positive: Squeezing the muscle as it goes into its flexed position.

• Negative: Slowly bring the weight down so the muscle is stretched.

• Repeat: Continue until you’ve hit muscle failure.

This will get you around that 30-second time mark for your set. 

What Hypertrophy Isn’t 

Hypertrophy sounds like you want extremely lightweight and perform as many reps as possible. This lightweight won’t be enough to stimulate the muscle to grow. You still need to lift enough weight to stimulate muscle growth. 

Taking the Lightest Weight Possible and Making it as Hard as Possible to Move 

To stimulate muscle growth, tension must be kept on it and challenged enough for the body to adapt. Looking over what was just covered, you may not be able to take an 80lb dumbbell and complete a set of squats with the ideal rep scheme. You may have to back off the weight 20-30lbs to keep the 3-4 second negative and hitting 8-10 reps. 

Progressive Overload

Gaining strength is a natural part of weight training. You will notice that as the weeks carry on, the weight you’re using starts to feel lighter and you’re not hitting muscle failure within 8-10 reps. This is a natural cycle with your training journey and could look something like this:

• Week 1: Weight is challenging, you hit failure at 8 reps.

• Week 2: Weight is still challenging, you hit failure at 8 reps but it’s not as hard to move as early in the set.

• Week 3: Weight is less challenging and you hit failure at 9 reps.

• Week 4: Your body is getting more used to the weight but you hit failure between 9 and 10 reps. 

• Week 5: Weight feels easy to start your set and you hit failure at 10 reps. 

• Weeks 6-7: Weight is extremely easy to move and you’re starting to hit failure at 12-15 reps. 

• Week 8: It’s time to increase the weight by 5-10 lbs. 

This occurrence is called progressive overload. Your body gets used to and adapts to the weight by growing bigger and stronger muscles. To continue the growth pattern you will have to increase the weight. 

Benefits of Training Without Heavy Weights

Whether you’re just starting your fitness journey, starting your home gym with PowerBlocks, or a combo of both, there are great benefits to training with lighter weight. 

No Spotter? No Problem.

Lifting lighter weights is safer when you don’t have a partner to spot you. While still sticking to the set design we outlined above, you still hit muscle failure but you aren’t risking injury by lifting extremely heavy without someone there to help you. 

Technique

Lighter weight allows you to focus on the proper form and technique of a movement while contracting the muscle group you’re targeting properly. This will help deepen your mind-muscle connection.

Mind Muscle Connection

The conscious contracting of a muscle group as you go through a movement. This connection develops over time through controlled movements. 

Safety

Even with a spotter, lifting heavy weights can cause injury, especially if your form is bad and you aren’t truly strong enough to lift that weight. Lifting lighter weights in a progressive overload scheme, allows you to build up to heavier weights in a safe manner. 

Workouts to Try

These 3 workouts can be added in addition to or can replace any of your current workouts. Use the information you’ve learned today and give them a shot.

The warm-up is to be performed with your body weight. The warm-up sets, also called feeler sets, are there to help you get used to load baring exercise. After each of those sets increase the weight slightly to get to your working set's weight. Your working sets are the sets you should be taking to failure using a weight that you can only get 8-10 reps from.