The punchline from this old comic sums it up quite well. Stamina is just as important as strength, its just harder to brag about without big printed weight numbers on the equipment.
afaik the general rule is that you want to be able to do about 8 reps and at the end you should be absolutely unable to do another rep (but you have to be careful to not hurt yourself, injury kills the gains)
also important is resting afterwards, you need to feel the delayed-onset muscle soreness or you ain’t building jackshit muscle, and it’s okay to do light exercise while feeling it but it’s easier to injure yourself while the muscles are recovering so wait until it passes before you do another workout pass.
Depends on your goal. For muscle volume build up, it is better to go for heavy resistance, but it is heavy resistance for you, which can be quite light when you just started.
Reps for building muscle strength are 3-6 per set, for volume 5-20. Either way of course to exhaustion. Which means that if you’re training for volume you’re going for the lighter weights, which makes sense as what increases with volume training is energy storage within the muscles, that is, it’s a stamina thing, each set is supposed to drain the local stores completely without increasing overall cardio and rate of energy transfer from elsewhere to the muscles, prompting growth of that storage, while the strength sets go straight for maximum resistance.
That kind of thing is especially obvious when you see at what callisthenics folks tend to do. Can’t do a pullup? Other people would switch to an easier variation than a full pullup, but they’ll say “nah I want to train that exact movement, and its full range, and all the exact muscles involved, and I wanna get strong ASAP” and proceed to do sets of only negatives (i.e. jump up to the bar, then let yourself down as slowly as you can).
Good point. I guess in my answer I have not even considered to differentiate strength vs volume. Only volume and strength vs endurance. I myself would not even try weights that give me only 3 repetitions per set, because I am not an athlete and from my experience I will have problems with tendons (also, I am not that young)
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