It has long been said in the bodybuilding community that you must do high reps for legs. Since the famous '20 rep squat program' - training legs with high reps have been in vogue. The question is, is there any sense in all this? And why is it only for legs? I'm going to give you the lowdown on why training your hams and quads using high reps may be beneficial.

The thing is, when it comes to training your legs - they seem to react much better by using a variation of reps.

If you want to build big quads, then higher reps may be the way to go. The reason for this is simply the fact that the quad muscles are primarily made of slow twitch muscle fibers. Slow twitch fibers are targeted in the 10-20 rep range.

This may be trued for quads, but what about hamstrings? Hamstrings contain more fast twitch type fibers - so for hypertrophy use reps less than 8 per set.

The most important thing though is too vary your reps, this will target both fast and slow twitch fibers for maximum growth. If your legs aren't growing on sets of 8 - try reps of 20, still not working? Try reps of 50! the key is to keep changing the rep range periodically.

Another often overlooked factor in all this is hormones. Research shows that performing high repetition sets of lower body exercises like squats cause an immediate release of growth hormone and testosterone. This is the whole theory behind the 20 rep squat program, the squats are so hard that the body releases all these hormones to compensate. So, by doing high reps for squats you are actually causing your WHOLE body to grow simply due to the release of GH and testosterone, try it and you will see what I mean.

So, the things to remember are to make sure you vary your rep range. Try two weeks of each rep range - I'm sure you will see some new growth. It may even be worth sticking in the higher rep ranges all the time - after all, a massive release of GH and testosterone can't be bad for your progress!