Your nervous system activates muscle fibers based on how much force you need to produce. Even if there was good evidence for fiber type specific hypertrophy, and even if there was a good, practical test to know a muscle’s fiber type breakdown, it still wouldn’t change the general recommendation to keep training that muscle with a variety of rep ranges.Įver since I’ve been into lifting, I’ve seen the idea that muscles should be trained differently due to the predominant muscle fiber type in that muscle.įor example, I’ve seen a lot of people say that it’s best to train hamstrings or triceps with low reps because they’re 70% fast-twitch, or that it’s best to train your delts with super high reps because they’re overwhelmingly slow-twitch.Īt a very basic physiological level, this idea makes sense.Evidence is still very mixed on this point – it’s not yet clear that particular training styles specifically target fast-twitch or slow-twitch fibers in the first place.
The idea that you should train muscles differently based on their predominant muscle fiber type comes from the notion that fast-twitch muscle fibers respond best to heavy weights and low reps, and that slow-twitch muscle fibers respond best to light weights and high reps.The methods you’d typically use in a gym setting (seeing how many reps you’d get with a particular percentage of your 1rm) have virtually no predictive power. There’s not a practical test to know whether a particular muscle is composed primarily of fast-twitch or slow-twitch fibers.Most muscles in your body have a fairly even split of fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscle fibers very few muscles are (on average) incredibly fast-twitch or slow-twitch dominant.2500 words 8-16 minute read time Key Points:
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