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[quote=Anonymous]So "heavy" and "light" weight is all relative. Saying...doing light weight and full range of motion doesn't help...and actually you should always be doing full range of motion regardless of the weight unless you are deliberately doing half reps. If you are lifting weights, i assume you want to either build muscle and/or strength. In order to do that, as one poster mentioned, you need to progressively overload the muscle....meaning each week or two you should be either increasing reps, sets, or weight doing the same exercise. There are so many exercises you can chose and, with those exercises, there are so many different combinations of sets and rep schemes. It's hard to dive into all of that, but, to answer your question, you should do enough reps until you only have about 1 or 2 reps left in the tank. Don't go to complete failure every time and don't stop unless you are near failure. By failure, I mean technical failure. Always use great technique and full range of motion. Once your form starts to break down, stop. For beginners, it's recommended to do higher reps per set so you get used to the motion. Once you get the hang of everything, lower reps are best for building strength and higher reps are better for building muscle. Some say you can go up 30 reps per exercise but I think that's ridiculous. I would stay with 10-12 reps per exercise for now and use a weight so that you only have one or two more reps in reserve when you get to your target number of reps. For example, say my exercise is shoulder presses and I want to do 12. I want to use a weight that when I get to 12, I could only do 13 or 14 reps max! If I can do 15 or 16 reps, increase the weight. If you can only do 10 or 11. That's ok. You can either decrease the weight or keep using that weight until you get to 12. Now whether or not that weight that you are using is "heavy" or "light" is different for everyone. Once you get comfortable lifting...say after a few months. you can start changing up the reps and using even heavier weight than what you were currently using and only doing 6-8 reps. But if you do chest press, row, shoulder press, chin ups/pull downs, squat/lunge, hinge/deadlift, some arms for 3 sets of 10-12 reps each, say 3 times a week for 3-4 months, you'll learn alot about your body and you will definitely increase strength and add muscle. Good luck.[/quote]

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