Long, Lean Muscles: Should Dancers Train with Light Weights, High Reps?

There’s a common belief that lifting lighter weights for high repetitions will help you "tone up" and achieve long, lean muscles, while heavy weights will make you “bulk up.” This myth often arises from a misunderstanding of how muscles respond to training. Here’s the reality: muscle tone and size aren’t determined by weight alone.

To understand the differences between toning and bulking -- and how dancers can pick the right weight for their needs -- let's discuss the science behind increasing muscle mass.

1. Understanding Muscle Growth

Muscle growth -- AKA hypertrophy -- is a physiological process that happens when muscle fibers are subjected to stress or tension. This stress causes microscopic damage to the muscle fibers, which then triggers a repair process. During repair, the muscle fibers rebuild thicker and stronger to adapt to the increased load. Thanks to many years of research, we know that hypertrophy can happen at a variety of training loads. This includes:

• Heavy loads x low repetitions

• Moderate loads x moderate repetitions

• Light loads x high repetitions

The key factor? Mechanical tension. This is the amount of stress applied during the working set. The stress, or load, can come from the barbell on your back during a squat...but it can also come from your bodyweight during a push-up, or a resistance band in a leg raise.

But it's not just the exercise or load that matters; overall training volume and diet will play a major role in determining muscle growth. Most people will need 10+ sets per muscle group per week in order to elicit hypertrophy. This number goes up as you become more experienced in lifting.

2. Light vs. Heavy Weights

So, what's the real difference between training with light or heavy weights? If both can contribute to muscle growth, won't lighter weights be the safer choice for dancers?

• Heavy weights have a higher neural demand (training your nervous system to become more efficient) and will recruit more of your type 2 (fast-twitch) muscle fibers. Both of these aspects develop your ability to produce force, which will improve strength, power, and overall athleticism.

• In contrast, lifting light weights will primarily train your type I (slow-twitch) muscle fibers. Using higher repetitions will train muscular endurance, which is helpful for some aspects of dance performance (like holding a balance for an extended period of time), but is not the same as developing force production for movements which require strength and power (like jumps, turns, and releves).

3. Recovery Time

Another consideration in the heavy vs. light weight discussion is fatigue and recovery.

You know that burning sensation you get during exercise? Higher-rep lifting leads to a build-up of metabolites, which are the byproducts of energy production in working muscles. As these accumulate, they contribute to "feeling the burn" and make it harder for the muscles to keep contracting efficiently. This is known as peripheral fatigue and contributes to DOMS (delayed-onset muscle soreness).

In contrast, when you lift heavy weights, your brain and spinal cord have to work hard to fire up lots of muscle fibers at once. Over time, this can fatigue the nervous system, but it does not lead to the same metabolite build-up as higher-repetition sets do. This is why quality is more important than quantity when it comes to heavy lifting.

This is an important distinction for dancers, because we need to be able to recover from the stress of our training. If we don't, it can have a negative impact on our performance in the studio and increase our injury risk. Lifting heavy weights at a low volume is less likely to cause muscle soreness, and the shorter sets equal a shorter (but still effective) workout. Less time in the gym = more time to recover.

4. Toning vs. Bulking

What's the difference between "toning" and "bulking"?

For a bodybuilder, bulking is a phase of training where the primary goal is to gain muscle mass by eating in a calorie surplus -- consuming more calories than the body burns each day. This is usually followed by a cutting phase (eating in a calorie deficit) to reduce body fat and increase the definition of the muscle mass which was gained during the bulk. Finally, they enter the maintenance phase (consuming calories equal to daily energy expenditure) to maintain their physique. This is alongside frequent, high-volume weightlifting most days of the week. The bodybuilder you see on a stage (or flexing on Instagram) will need to continue this cycle for many years in order to build significant muscle mass and definition.

'Toned' is mostly a made-up marketing term. From a training perspective, muscle growth is muscle growth. The toned body you admire on someone else is mainly down to genetics and bodyfat percentage - not their Pilates routine. If you take two people with the same BMI and percentage of muscle mass, but a 10cm (4 inch) difference in height, whose muscles will appear longer? The one with the longer limbs. Genetics also play a role in bodyfat distribution, which means one person could have a visible 6-pack without any effort, and another would need dangerously-low bodyfat if they wanted defined abdominals muscles.

You cannot train for "long" or "lean" muscles anymore than you can train to change your height or eye colour. Despite what teachers or social media may have led you to believe, a toned body is not the secret to becoming a better dancer or the key to achieving your dreams.

A better goal for dancers? Get stronger, more explosive, and more resilient to injury.

The Bottom Line:

There's more to lifting weights than muscle growth

If you are afraid that lifting weights is going to ruin your dance physique, don't be. Most people severely underestimate how difficult it is to gain the high amount of muscle mass that bodybuilders have. It takes years of intentional diet and high-volume training and is not something that will happen by accident. Plus, there is a big difference between training like an athlete and training like a bodybuilder!

And in case the explanation wasn't clear before: lifting light weights for high repetitions is not more beneficial for dancers than lifting heavy weights. In many cases, introducing a few heavy compound lifts 2-3x per week will unlock the strength and athleticism your dancing has been missing all along.

Next Steps

Ready to start training? Check out my resistance training course for dancers here.

Get in touch if you are interested in 1:1 coaching.

Read more about the benefits of strength training for dancers.