You do HOW many sets?
A little while ago I was talking to a friend about the Power 90 DVD workout I’m doing. He’s a gym type of guy and kind of laughed when I said the workout has you do only one set to failure of each exercise with 8-15 reps, depending on if your just toning (12-15) or going for muscle gain (8-10). There’s very little rest between a set and moving on to another muscle group. It’s a fast paced circuit type workout using dumbbells, push-ups, squats, etc. that really keeps my heart rate up. The same type of circuit training used in P90X. He’s used to doing many sets with rests in between, usually with a friend spotting while he does a set, then switching so your resting in between each set. To me, the one set workout seemed to make sense since I thought you get most of your gains in the first set and saw diminishing returns on each successive set therefore this was the most efficient use of your workout time.
What made me think of this conversation was a recent article on over training over at T-Nation. I’m not going to repeat everyting in the article but they talk about seeing muscle gain by doing a set to failure (while keeping good form), possiblly two or three sets max, then moving on.
It’s always nice to have another source back up the theory of what your doing.
