Lifting weights can be a great way to keep up your fitness, especially if you’re aiming to increase the strength of your muscles. However, whether you’re a beginner or a more advanced weight lifter, it’s super important to know exactly how much weight you can lift as a maximum, and how much you should be lifting for your size.
This isn’t only so that you can better achieve your fitness goals and muscle building appropriately, it’s also so that you minimize the risk of an accident occurring, or of you suffering an injury from lifting too much weight.
The amount of weight that you should be lifting, depends on how much weight your muscles can handle. First, you figure out what your muscles can lift in their current size, and then you slowly adapt your fitness heavy weight lifting routines to slowly push the limits, building up strength in your muscles so that they can handle more and more weight over time and training.
To determine your initial weight, according to your current muscle size, or capabilities, you need to work out the number of reps. So basically, you need to decide how many reps of each exercise you want to perform. Then, it takes a little bit of trial and error, but you need to test out which amount of weight allows you to perform all of the reps in perfect form, without it being too easy.
Essentially: You should be lifting the amount of weight that allows you to perform all of the reps perfectly, without it being too easy, as you want it to be a bit of an effort so that your muscles are actually working.
If you’re looking to build up your muscle strength over time, along with muscle endurance, then it’s best to lift a bit less weight, but perform a higher number of reps. Meanwhile, performing fewer reps but lifting a higher amount of weight will train you to lift heavier weights a lot faster.
The ideal amount of reps for weight lifting is sets of between 3 and 6 reps.