[quote]Airtruth wrote:
Cephalic_Carnage wrote:
I’m with mr. popular here, guys…
I only care about the last “all-out” set of each exercise… I’ve done the previous sets a dozen times (or even a hundred times) before, I doubt they add anything to my growth…
Didn’t we have a discussion about that stuff in the t-cell, i.e. people saying that pros do 12 sets per bodypart while in truth 8-9 of those are really progressively heavier non-failure warm-ups…
You call a warm-up putting everything you have into your last rep of a set just because you didn’t fail? Or are you saying they are just bullshitting for those 8 or 9 sets after their warm up.
If I do 2 warm up sets then do 5 sets after, whether the weight is the same or more, the last rep of each set may not be me “absolute” failure but it’s damn sure all I can do. I can’t consider that a warm up.
Maybe you and popular never plataue but for those of us who have knowing how many sets you’ve done before sure helps with progressing. A fast set of one rep is nearly useless to me, so we’re talking about sets of 3 or 5 reps, when I’m at my max I just can’t add more weight or reps…so how would I progress?..Add a set.
Sure adding endless sets can lead to overtraining but not if you don’t do it every workout for the rest of your life. I will continue to add sets until my reps go up. If it goes up I drop all the extra sets. That way I have progressed, plus my training capacity has increased, so the number of sets is not as taxing and “feels” like a recovery week, when it’s really a normal workout week. [/quote]
Read again:
Didn’t we have a discussion about that stuff in the t-cell, i.e. people saying that pros do 12 sets per bodypart while in truth 8-9 of those are really progressively heavier non-failure warm-ups…
Also: dude, does your strength never go up or what?
If on one “work set” I do x lbs for 10 reps, then next time I either add weight or do more reps with that weight… And if I can’t beat what I’ve done previously:
a) I just do a different exercise for the same muscle-group for a while
b) Generally rotate exercises like curls where adding weight is more difficult anyway.
c) Eat more (this solves the problem 90 percent of the time, and no, I’m not joking here.)
And what are you talking about here:
I don’t get what’s so hard to understand, say Bodybuilder x does BB Curls.
So it goes like this:
bar * 12, the “true warmup” ← not strenuous at all, maybe not full rom and just pumping to get some blood in.
bar + X * 10
bar + 2X (whatever, more weight basically) * 8-10 feels a little heavier (obviously)
bar + 3x * 8-10 straining but non-failure.
bar + 4x * however many he gets, if he gets more than, say, 10, he will increase the weight next time and work his way up to 10 again.
One can count that as 1 warmup+4 work sets, but that’s misleading because to some people “work sets” means all-out sets, while some just count any set heavier than the first as a work set… for some reason.
I for one do however many progressively heavier sets before the all-out one (which, to me, are warm-ups, but this is just a word man! Call them ramp-up sets or whatever…) that I think I need on that particular day…
If it’s cold or the muscles feel tight or whatever, I do more to be on the safe side…
That is how virtually every big guy trains in bodybuilding… You can count the sets differently or call them differently, but it’s still the same thing and you can do whatever you prefer…
I would only say that I did 2 work sets of an exercise if those two were the same weight and were all-out, but I don’t see any purpose in doing 2 same-weight sets for an exercise, as I’ve said.
Not trying to offend any of you multiple-work-set guys here, just saying.