7 reasons Why You Should lift HEAVY

LIfting heavy weights will help you build muscle and reduce body fat in the most practical way. Many people wonder whether you should lift heavy or light weights, and this video helps answer this question. Although both heavy and light weights can produce great results, lifting heavy tends to be the more practical way to experience faster muscle growth.
🔥 FREE 6 Week Shred:

📲 FREE Diet/Workout Planner Tool:

Lifting heavier weights will help you build muscle, get stronger, and burn more fat, yet most people don't even understand what it means to lift heavy and why you should be doing it. In fact, the concept of lifting heavy weights is something that most regular day-to-day gym goers confuse as only benefiting powerlifters and maybe bodybuilders. But the truth is, whether you're a beginner, an intermediate lifter, or an advanced athlete, lifting heavy is one of the most essential aspects of building strength, muscle mass, and improving overall fitness. So if you're one of the many people that avoid lifting heavy due to several reasons like being fearful of an injury, or not knowing how to progress, or simply believing that lighter weights are safer or more effective this video will definitely help change your mind. It'll provide actionable steps you can take right away. 
So the first reason why you should be lifting heavy is because it will help you build strength faster. 

At its core, lifting heavy weights is a direct way to build maximal strength and power. It's pretty straightforward to understand if you look at strength for what it is, a skill, and to get better at any skill, you need to practice it under increasingly challenging conditions. Lifting heavily forces your muscles to recruit more muscle motor units, which leads to better neuromuscular adaptations. When you lift heavier loads, you stimulate type II muscle fibers, which are responsible for producing high levels of force and power. These fibers grow and strengthen more significantly when exposed to heavy resistance versus light resistance which will stimulate more type 1 muscle fibers. Type 2 muscle fibers are more connected to strength, size, and explosiveness as opposed to type 1 muscle fibers that are more connected to having sustained endurance, and fatigue resistance. When you lift heavy weights, your central nervous system will also become more efficient at recruiting muscle fibers, especially the high-threshold motor units that are activated during heavy lifting.

This doesn’t just make you stronger in the gym; it transfers to improved performance in other areas of your life—whether that’s being able to pick up a heavy box, improving athletic performance, or simply moving through daily tasks with more ease. This is how lifting heavy weights also helps improve your strength-to-bodyweight ratio, which is essential for athletes and anyone interested in improving overall performance. When you make lifting heavy weights a priority in your program, you’re training both the physiological and neural components of strength at the same time. This is not to say that lifting light weights doesn't have its fair share of benefits and can lead to substantial muscle growth. But generally lifting light will not recruit as many muscle fibers as lifting heavy. The lower intensity means that your muscles don't have to exert as much force, which leads to slower strength gains. So you should prioritize lifting weights that are around 75 to 90% of your one rep max with any given exercise. Or to simplify this if you don't know your one rep max you should be aiming for roughly 6 to 9 reps with a weight load that's heavy enough to make you hit failure somewhere within that rep range.   

Now another huge benefit of lifting heavy is that it'll increase muscle mass. Although there are plenty of bodybuilding techniques like using moderate weights with higher reps, lifting heavy weights tends to go hand in hand with more muscle growth. This is because lifting heavy leads to greater mechanical tension, which is one of the most significant factors in stimulating muscle growth. I already mentioned that lifting heavy leads to a higher proportion of type 2 muscle fibers being recruited to generate maximum force. These muscle fibers also happen to be the most prone to hypertrophy, meaning that lifting heavy will likely lead to more substantial and more defined muscle growth over time. The process of progressive overload can be achieved with light weights or heavy weights, but it quickly becomes impractical to continue adding reps with light weights due to breakdowns in form, cardiovascular fatigue, or muscular fatigue that isn't caused by necessarily working your muscles to their strength capacity. For example, if your doing 100 lightweight squats you more likely to have breakdowns in your form as your reps get higher and you're more likely to encounter exhaustion from the cardio aspect rather than the muscular strength…