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Comment by coryfklein | Hacker News Reader

Which one wouldn't, presumably, experience if only doing 5lb weights? I'm not making judgment on whether "noob gains" are good or bad, just trying to understand why the OP even made the comment about 5lb weights in the first place.

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Lifting 5lb weights -- unless you're starting out not strong at all -- won't do much to increase strength. You know how, say, a crane can lift a 20,000-pound rock 10,000 times before it breaks, but lifting a 20-pound rock doesn't stress the crane one thousandth as much? Your muscles work the same way: lifting a 5-pound weight is not going to make you stronger at all. If you want to get stronger, you need to lift something your body thinks is heavy.

The post was in the context of dieting and maintaining muscle mass. If you don't care about increasing strength but you just want to maintain muscle mass while decreasing calorie count, could you do that by just exercising with small weights, or would that be approximately the same as not weight lifting at all?

The latter

Exercising with small weights just means you will burn through calories. To gain muscle mass you literally need to tear muscle fibers so your body rebuilds with stronger ones.

You may want to see some evidence on those claims. For example:

https://www.mensjournal.com/health-fitness/if-you-want-build...

> “Lift to the point of exhaustion and it doesn’t matter whether the weights are heavy or light.”

I would like to see this study on muscle gains supplemented by others showing the effects of these different exercise regiments on bone density and ligaments.

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