What rep range do I use?

Today being international chest day I thought what better than to train chest of course. I met up with one of my mates at the gym and over a pre workout espresso he asked me an interesting question, ‘what is the best rep range in order to building muscle?’. 

This is a point that is always being discussed and many people will tell you 10-12 reps, otherwise known as the hypertrophy range. To build strength you should be hitting 5 or below and to increase endurance aim for anywhere from 12-20 reps per the set. However, I was recently reading a study in Men’s Health which had shown you should perform no more than 8 reps if you're looking to build muscle. This ends up with you questioning what rep range should I be using? Well I’ve got the answers in order to make you hit all of this easy, based on todays chest workout. 

1. Start with your compound move of the session. For me today this was flat bench press. I warmed up to 3 working sets of 3 reps in a pyramid fashion. I then dropped the weight by 20% to hit 8-10 reps for 2 sets, then lastly bodyweight for 12 or failure. This straight away is recruiting a good few rep ranges.
2. I then like to move onto incline flies purely to flood the muscle with blood, for this I used ascending pyramids hitting sets at 15,12,10,8 and 6 reps. The last set add in a triple drop set. The first two sets you are treating more like pump sets, however the triple drop set in total will add up to 20 reps, more of what can be described as a endurance rep range. Again you have used all rep ranges, perform these with a good slow tempo and contraction, not all to failure. I’ve recently gone a lot heavier in these movements and have noticed such a difference to growth in my chest. 
3. My third exercise was incline dumbbell press again with a similar fashion to above however I ascending up in weight to then decrease back down. By this point however I was quite fatigued however still managed to push out a good weight with the rep scheme 12,10,8,12,15. 
4. I always like to mix this exercise up in my routine so today it was a competition between me and my training partner performing dips. 100 reps in total, fewest sets wins. This really pushes the muscle to failure and beyond as you can compete against one another. No matter rep ranges, a muscle pushed this hard will have to grow. 
5. The finisher today was high to low cable fly triple drop sets followed by prison press ups, reps determined by your age. Do this for three sets. This keeps things a little more interesting as oppose to the normal rep scheme you'd use. For a demonstration check out Steve Cook’s channel on youtube. He always uses them and they are great to use as a finisher. 

So there you go, a workout which demonstrates how you can target the muscle with all different types of rep ranges. This will keep the muscle guessing, pushing it in different ways but more importantly keeping things interesting for you. Fundamentally a muscle pushed to failure will instinctively grow stronger, thus bigger so don’t get to hung up on rep schemes. 

Hope this helps

Jack