Muscle Building Exercise Strategy Revealed

A team from McMaster University (Ontario, Canada) reveals a strategy to muscle building that counters the prevailing notion that holds that to build muscle size, you need to lift heavy weights.  Nicholas Burd and colleagues assessed the effect of resistance exercise intensity (% 1 repetition maximum—1RM) and volume on muscle protein synthesis, anabolic signaling, and myogenic gene expression, enrolling 15 men (average age 21 years, BMI 24 kg/m2) to lift light weights that represented a percentage of what the subjects could maximally lift.  At 30%, the team observed that subjects could lift that weight at least 24 times before they felt fatigue.  The researchers report that: “These results suggest that low-load high volume resistance exercise is more effective in inducing acute muscle anabolism than high-load low volume or work matched resistance exercise modes.”