niteowl said:
PowerTrip said:
Before someone says it, let's just clear up the myth and make it clear that high rep exercises do not make you more well defined than high weight low rep exercises. Your diet/bodyfat are what affect the definition of your muscles the most.
In my experience with weight lifting that is utter bullshit.
Shortly after I started working in a factory I stopped my weight training
My work was pretty physical in a cardio and a weight lifting kinda way
One of my duties was checking wire. I had to pull 1-5k meters of wire from a machine. This required a lot of a swimming/flapping action with my arms. I did this multiple times a day.
One day I went into the gym to work out and noticed definition in my shoulder muscles that I could never get when I was training. It could only be the high rep, wire checking I was doing at work, since I had quit my weight training
Unless you have some link proving otherwise
I will continue to believe that high reps/low weight = more definition
It's pretty well known that the high rep = definition theory is a total myth. Definition comes from one factor, and that is muscle size compared to the amount of bodyfat in the area. This is a basic fact of bodybuilding. If a guy weighing 300lbs does 1000 situps a day will he have visible abs? I don't care if he does that for years, as long as he is still taking in the calories to maintain that same amount of bodyfat, the muscle growth from the situps will never be enough to give him a six pack.
I too worked in a factory for a while performing a very physically demanding job for sometimes 12 hour shifts per day. I also noticed more definition throughout my body. This definition was not from muscle growth though. It came as a result of me performing physical work and burning a decent amount of calories for 12 straight hours...
The false logic in the high rep theory comes from the belief that the "ripped" look comes from adding muscle. This is not true. Well defined muscle comes from having no bodyfat on top of it to hide the features. If you take a guy who is 300lbs and obese at 20% bodyfat, all you would need to do is remove all of the fat from his body until it were down to 5-7% and he would look like an olympic sprinter. Have his muscles changed in this scenario? No. Muscle is muscle. It is a mass of fibers. The only factor in how they appear from the outside is how much fat is surrounding them and making them look rounded instead of fibrous.
Take a look at this website. There is an example of different guys at different bodyfat percentages: http://jcdfitness.com/2009/03/what-is-my-body-fat-percentage/
As you scroll down you can see that muscle definition is directly linked to the amount of bodyfat the person is carrying. When professional bodybuilders step on stage they are in the realm of ~4% which is very unhealthy and not something that can be maintained indefinitely. By the time they get down to that percentage they will have lost a considerable amount of weight in both fat and muscle.
So returning to your observation that the factory work made you defined, I believe this and I have experienced it myself. It has very little to do with the added muscle though. You are burning a significant amount of calories for extended periods of time and as a result your bodyfat percentage drops. High rep weight lifting and factory work do have an advantage over simply jogging because engaging the muscles more directly for short bouts of higher intensity will cause the trauma necessary for the body to attempt to rebuild and hold onto the muscle that it has. Jogging for example is more like a constant slow drain on the body that will more likely cause a significant amount of muscle loss along with fat. This is where the advantages of high intensity interval training (HIIT) come in, because they work the muscles very hard for short durations and give an anabolic effect while also burning calories in the process. This is why sprinters and factory workers will be ripped due to the way they burn calories, while people who run marathons are burning more calories but will have little muscle because of it.
So there we have it. The best course to follow if you want to be ripped is lift as much and as often as you can to keep your body anabolic and trying to build muscle. While at the same time keeping the calories clean and low so that there is a net negative every day. Higher protein will be muscle sparing. And finally the high rep myth is probably in part perpetuated by the fact that guys who are "cutting" are taking in low calories, low fat, low carbs and they really dont have the energy to come in the gym and move heavy weights. So the best thing they can do is lift lighter and do more reps so they are still taxing the muscles enough to maintain anabolism. In the end though, reducing calories and cutting always causes some amount of muscle loss because the main signal for growth is an abundance of calories. I can't comment on whether or not using anabolic steroids while cutting would allow someone to break this rule. It would at the very least allow more muscle to be spared.
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I spit reality, instead of what you usually learn
and I refuse to be concerned with condescending advice
cause I'm the only motherfucker that can change my life
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niteowl 
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I mean I don't think I'll get bigger unless I start to elevate my feet, but I still haven't met my first goal yet. But I feel more confidant about myself, which is the entire point of exercise.
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