Light vs. Heavy

Once again, you find me blogging about working out. This time it's not going to be about how to do workouts and what muscle groups they work. This time it's going to be about light and heavy weights.

To start it off, your muscles have two kinds of muscle fibers: slow twitch, and fast twitch.

Slow twitch are the muscle fibers you get from high repetition with light weights, and jogging. Slow twitch muscles are good for enduring things, such as long runs, repetitive light work, some body weight workouts, and burning fat. Working your slow twitch muscle will also make you defined, and build a little muscle. Cardio workouts often work slow twitch muscle because they always keep you moving. Cardio burns fat (and help your cardio), hence why I said working your slow twitch muscles burns fat. An example of a slow twitch workout is when I was curling 20 pounds. I could curl them a ton of times, like around 30. Maybe more. That's high repetition.


Fast twitch muscle fibers are the fibers that make you faster, bulk up, get stronger, and increase explosiveness. The way you build fast twitch muscle fibers is by lifting heavy weights, or doing something you can only do 1-15 times. 2-10 is best because that way your aren't only doing it once, and you're still working your fast twitch muscles fibers. For example, I'm curling 40 pounds right now. I can only curl them 4-5 times per arm, so those are working my fast twitch muscles.

As you might be able to guess guess, I want to lift heavy weights because they will help me with my speed, and I'm already quite defined, but not that strong. Sprinters need fast twitch fibers to become faster. That's one of the reasons I bought the weighted vest and I want to get ankle weights. With those I can work fast twitch and slow twitch fibers with body weight workouts.