I just re-read your message. It sounds like you are almost agreeing with me but you just don't want to admit it. I never said low weight + high reps does NOT result in building muscle mass. It absolutely does. I did make a symantical mistake, however. I said high reps builds stregnth while low reps builds mass. High reps tends to build muscle endurance. Which is why I did used the analogy of pulling a wheel barrow earlier requires stregnth but also requires one to sustain the effort over time. I said always said if your goal is to "bulk" up, as a body builder would, the workout program is very different than say a distance runner. The previous article about gymnastics supports that. So to recap, football players would need to incorporate both types of lifting in their routine, more so than an Olympic weight lifter. The weight lifter's goal is literally a 6 second output. Where in football, you must sustain your output over an entire game...even though it tends to be in short bursts. Endurance is still very important in football particulaly in the 4th qrt after you've been pounding all afternoon. In order for a weight lifter to change sports, they would OBVIOUSLY need to change their entire workout regimen. No offense taken. It's been a long time since I've had such a detailed discussion on the topic so this was an interesting refresher for me. It may have even inspired me to start working out again!
I think the problem was you never said what you meant by heavy weight and low reps. I think of that as near maximal attempts. If you just meant doing sets of 6-8 reps with as much weight as possible fot that rep range, then yeah I agree with you. High reps build strength, low reps build strength, all reps build strength, but you need to define what you mean by strength. There are many types including limit strength, dynamic strength, strength endurance, etc. A football player would actually train very similar to an olympic lifter. I happen to be more interested in lifting for sports, not bodybuilding. USC and LSU have two of the top S&C programs and they both basically use a modified olympic lifting format. Strength endurance doesn't mean much. By that I mean being able to do a ton of reps of 225. Repeated maximal effort is what the goal is. Endurance is trained more outside of the weight room on the field.
Yea, I mistated what I meant by 'strength.' I'll grant you that olympic weight lifters are similar to football but there are differences. I was simply pointing out the differences between the two types of programs, from a generic perspective, to illustrate how there are different types of lifting based on what goals you are trying to acheive. I think we've thoroughly killed this topic.
