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I have two fitness goals at the moment, in priority order:
For the recent past, I've been focusing on this by adopting a more "bulking" strategy, wherein, I'd use larger weight for my exercises, and try to push my muscles to hit higher and higher weight limits. I'd usually do this by doing 2 to 3 of sets of 12 to 15 reps for each muscle, trying to push myself to muscle failure. So basically, more weight, less reps.
However, for achieving my stated goals, how does the above bulking strategy compare to a "toning" strategy, where I'd essentially be doing less weight, for more reps, and more time. With this sort of strategy, I may be doing up to 5 minutes of reps at a time, but with 1/2 to 1/3 of the weight as I'd be doing for bulking.
Which strategy is better to help me achieve my goal? Or should I do a mix, in which case, what percentage of time should be spent on each?
Doing both goals is possible if you are a novice. In that case I would recommend sticking to the 5-20 rep range and focusing on clean technique. Pushing to true muscular failure is probably not necessary, I don't interpret this as a license to totally slack off though. I would just stop at technical failure or 1-2 reps shy, normally this is perceived as "hard." Especially for people who have never trained hard before.
The terminology used here is... slightly non-standard. The dominant factor for losing fat or gaining muscle, assuming hard resistance training, is energy or caloric balance. If you are not a novice, and you would like to do both, you will either have to separate the goals into distinct periods or (not recommended though @self_made_human might provide a counter argument) hop on anabolics.
@Mewis's description agrees with my own interpretation of the consensus on muscle building stimulus. It's not clear there is an upper bound for the number of reps where hypertrophy stimulus stops, but below 50-60% of one rep max weights getting anywhere close to an effective distance from failure is very difficult. For example, say we define an effective set as within 4 reps of muscular failure. Choosing a weight of 1/2 of 1RM might be anywhere from 20-100 reps for true muscular failure. This is the first problem with very low weights, choosing a target to hit is very hard. Now say the true number of clean reps to failure is 50, reps 40-46 are all going to feel horrible. If you stop at 40 though, we likely haven't gotten 'close enough' to failure to deliver a quality stimulus. This is despite doing a lot of mechanical work/volume. Compare to targeting 80% of 1RM. the number of reps to failure is likely 7 or 8. If you do 5 reps you are for sure within 4 reps of true failure. So you deliver a higher quality stimulus while having to do less total tonnage. At 30% of 1RM your not really targeting muscles in the anabolic or even anti-catabolic sense. You would probably be better off with a different modality of training, like an elliptical or something.
For completeness, for pure strength the 3-5 rep range is generally considered the Goldilocks zone (with occasional singles, doubles, and higher rep work).
I'm no expert on the matter, and my previous post was largely asking for information about the drugs so I could make an informed decision, so I'm going to recuse myself for now!
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