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Originally Posted by PhxJudoJujitsu
It's impossible to be 5'10" 215lbs at 3.5% of top amatuer bodybuilders by relying solely on high rep, low weight work, you wouldn not be able to build sufficient amounts of fast twitch muscles.
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The point is that you don't need to train fast twitch fibers to increase size. Two prime examples I can give you are the training methods of Scott Abel, who does nothing but train bodybuilders for a living, and a former IFBB pro Nimrod King. One of my friends and trainers was turned into a 300 pound plus monster by Scott, however, despite his strength, most of the training they did consisted of endless sets of pump sets with what would've been estimated to be betwee 50% and 70% of 1RM done with a slow cadence. Unless there's some force (acceleration) being produced with each rep, this type of training really doesn't recruit higher threshold motor units unless the muscles are taken close to their fatiguing point, which should be avoided by strength athletes anyway since constantly fatiguing (or training a muscle to failure) increases end plate threshold, which decreases potential force production. Whatever increase in fiber diameter that might occur isn't happening in fast glycolytic fibers, it's mostly occuring in slow oxidative and slow glycolytic fibers.
Nimrod King is another example. Google him and take a look a look at his thighs. Interestingly enough he rarely squatted more that 225 lbs in the gym, yet he would do countless reps with that weight. A couple of the older guys who got me into strength training used to ask Nimrod why he wouldn't lift heavier. His response was more or less, "Who cares about strength? I just want to be big."
The bottom line is training for size doesn't necessarily require stimulating fast twitch fibers. It doesn't hurt to do it but but targeting higher threshold motor units isn't a requisite to increasing apparent muscular size.