One of the most important parts of any workout program are the sets and reps and how you are performing your exercises. When the goal is to build muscle, how many sets and reps you do matters - a lot. Of course, the answer to this question lies not in some random recommendation but rather in asking the right questions to get you the exact answer that’s right for you.
First, you need to clarify what the main goal of your training actually is. If you are training to be a better athlete, training for strength or maybe even endurance, then any low volume minimal sets approach is going to be ineffective in the long run. If however, your goal is to build muscle and get bigger then you definitely need to take a look at the type of volume that you are performing in your workouts.
Here however, it begs the question of how much effort are you willing or able to put forth in your workouts?
This is huge.
There is some confusion around whether the goal of any workout is to find the maximum amount of work that your body can tolerate beyond which you are no longer able to make gains or to find the bare minimum effective dose of training that creates a positive stimulus for growth. If you choose the former, you may quickly find that you cross that threshold into impaired recovery and stalled muscle gains if perhaps you have a stressful week, string of bad night’s sleep or even particularly high volume workout.
On the other hand, if the minimum stimulus is achieved at a lower dose and you ensure that you maintain the ability to properly recover from it - only to be able to ensure that you come back to the next workout with just as much energy and ability to put forth that maximum effort needed to reach the minimum threshold once again - then you are likely to experience much faster muscle gains.
This philosophy was one that Mike Mentzer employed with his Heavy Duty training. I have been a proponent of aspects of heavy duty training while being critical of others for years now. What I believe Mike got right however was that when training natural, the amount of volume you perform in your workouts must be carefully monitored if you want to see continued progress.
You simply do not have the ability to ignore recovery like steroid users do since you don’t have the same biological responses to training.
That said, one of the drawbacks to Mike Mentzer’s training was that many people are unable to bring adequate intensity to their workouts to perform just one set and get a positive result. It is for this reason that people will extend their workouts to more sets and more reps. Sometimes performing up to 20 sets or more in a single workout - even devoted at times to one single muscle group.
If you are a novice (not a rank beginner) then it might make sense for you to take a new approach to finding what specific number of sets and reps is best to grow muscle for you. This is most easily achieved by performing one set to absolute failure. Many of the people who once advocated training with reps in reserve are now somehow all pushing failure. If you decide to train this way and do not see the results you are looking for you can always logically increase to two sets and re-monitor. If you are doing many more sets you wouldn’t necessarily know if the next adjustment should be up or down and you could be wasting time in your pursuit.
Is one set to failure right for everybody?
Definitely not if you struggle putting forth a maximum effort. And the good news here is that it seems that lower effort bouts strung together are potentially capable of creating as good of an end result in muscle growth albeit at the expense of much more time spent and volume.
The bottom line is, rather than constructing your entire training around a specific number of sets and reps figure out the effort that you are capable of consistently bringing with you to the gym and putting into your workouts. From there, adapt your volumes and frequency to fit the effort and you will find the exact number that is best suited to you.
Sets and Reps Done Right - athleanx.com/x/proper-sets-an...
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