How Many Sets Do You Really Need To Get Stronger?

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Welcome to There is a Method to the Magnet. My name is Ron Maxwell, and I'm an exercise physiologist and personal trainer. I am the owner of Maxwell's Fitness Program and have been in business since 1994. The purpose of this podcast is to get to the real deal of what really worked and most importantly why things worked. Hence the name, There is a Method to the Magnet. Before I get started today, let me thank Jonathan and Lynn Gilding of the Gilding Group ELT Pros. They are committed to providing the highest level of customer service in home sales. Why don't you give them a shout and figure out what your home is worth? 386-451-2412. Welcome to There Is a Method to the Madness today. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. I hope you got a workout in or you're getting ready to get a workout in. I uh did a workout this morning, did some strength this morning, feeling good. I always feel better after a workout. It's such a like an amazing thing. And sometimes I'm just blown away that more people don't do it. But then I realize that a lot of people don't know, and there's all these myths and all these things that confuse people out there in the internet. So that's one of the goals, or probably the biggest goal of this podcast is to dispel a lot of those things and talk about the real science involved in exercise and diet. So it is less intimidating and more likely for it to be something that you're going to do. So today I know this is one of those topics. I had a client today who asked me, he's fairly new to working out. He has been healthy and fit most of his life doing a lot of cardio, but he had the itch to get into strength training, which I think is a very wise decision for everybody. It is one of those things that's just going to make your life better. I just wrapped up the email that's going to be sent out tomorrow, and I talked about for less than 1% of your time spent in a week, you can get all of these benefits from strength training. One hour in the week, 30 minutes twice a week is enough to get major, major benefits for strength training. So I'll take 1%. I think that's a pretty good rate on return. I mean, you look at what the stock market's doing, I'll take that investment any day of the week. So proud of him for starting up. And um, he asked me a very good question. Um, you know, he either got thinking or got talking to somebody, you know, who knows, or just um, you know, things circulate around. He and he asked me about like the difference with different amounts of sets, like one set of exercise versus two sets versus three sets, and people he knows will do like three sets of ten on a certain exercise or you know, something to that effect. And then he also asked about the repetition range a little bit. He had heard that lighter weights for more repetitions lead to toning and lower reps with heavier loads lead to bulking and greater strength. You know, that myth has been around long before I even got into this field. It's been something or one of those things that me and other exercise physiologists have been trying to knock out. But I don't know if we'll ever completely knock it out. But I'm a big believer in the old starfish thing where you can save one starfish by throwing it in. You won't save all of them. So if I can just help this guy out and then a few other people on these mists, then I had a good day. So that is my focus. Try to help the people that come into my world or somehow come upon me. So I'm gonna tackle these two things. Let's first look at the sets. Now, in strength training, we call volume the amount of sets and exercises and to some extent repetitions that you do. Like that's the amount. That's what volume is. It's not the intensity, it's the amount. So if you were looking at, say, cardiorespiratory endurance, endurance, the volume would be miles and or time. Like how much, how many hours? Like Iron Man triathletes talk about doing up to 20 hours a week of exercise. So that's a lot of volume. Or they might say a runner might say they're running 70 to 100 miles a week when they're running. That's volume, but it doesn't say anything about intensity. And intensity, of course, is big. In the exercise world, we use frequency, intensity, time as the exercise prescription. Fit, I'm sure you get it. Frequency, intensity, time. Like put the three together, you need to have you need to consider every variable of the three when you're writing an exercise prescription because you can't have a lot of volume and intensity at the same time. So for strength training, the volume or the amount is pretty much in exercises and sets. Sets per week, sets per workout, but it's in sets. A set is a grouping of repetitions. I assume I shouldn't make too many assumptions, but most people know that. So if you did, if you picked up a barbell and you curled it 10 times, that would be one set of 10. So long before I got into the field of exercise science as a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, nutritionist, and strength conditioning coach, the argument of how many sets was going on. So the high set people or the super high volume people kind of started out in the 1970s in Muscle Beach, California. And it was Arnold Schwarzenegger, uh Franco Colombo, um who else? It was Dave Draper, it was all these elite bodybuilders, Lou Ferrigno. Um, they were all pretty much part of that muscle beach scene, and it they were kind of famous for working out on the beach. I mean, literally, it was just a big deal in California. So that's when the bodybuilding culture kind of started to hit mainstream. It was just before some of Arnold's movies started coming out, and then the Incredible Hulk with Lou Frigno. So they were starting to become more popular. The muscle magazine started covering them. Joe Weeder with muscle and fitness pretty much helped make Arnold famous. And their workouts became pretty legendary. They would do at least 20 sets per muscle group in a workout. So, in other words, if they were working their chest, they would do 20 sets of chest. They would do either two a day with their workouts, like chest in the morning and back at night, um, quads in the morning the next day, hamstrings at night. Sometimes it would be legs and shoulders, but they were just on a major high volume kick. Now, number one, they could. I mean, this was their job for one thing. They could work out, they were all sponsored or working for Joe Weeder or doing modeling or doing some acting, but essentially this was their job. None of them really, from what I know, ever really worked at anything else. So, number one, they could. Now, I'm not talking out of school here because Arnold has made it very clear, but in those days he was taking a lot of anabolic steroids. They all were. Again, this is no secret. He's confessed to that, he's talked about it, he and they took a lot of drugs. So, anabolic steroids, what they do is they help you heal. That's what they do. Anabolic means growth. So they would take different forms of anabolic steroids. It helps them grow, it helps them grow in recovery. That's what it does. So, that on top of the fact they were in their 20s, they're going to recover from exercise very, very quickly. So they could do that. They were taking drugs, they weren't working, they were young, they could work out pretty much all day. I mean, there's these legendary workouts, crazy things that they would do. And they could get away with it because, again, the drugs, they help you recover. Now, at the time in the 1970s and early 1980s, I mean, the drug use stayed in bodybuilding. It's not like that has disappeared. But um at this time, they weren't talking about the drugs, of course. The drugs came out later. They admitted to taking the drugs later. So nobody knew for sure, although most people suspected that they were taking something. So everybody is just kind of going around going, oh, look at what the bodybuilders are doing in California. And the old, you know, you tell somebody, I tell somebody, it just gets going. And believe it or not, that is where all the super high volume sets came from. It was from the bodybuilding world. Now, of course, when they're writing out their workouts and putting them in Muscle and Fitness magazine, and then some of the other bodybuilding magazines at the time, they're not confessing to taking steroids. They're just saying, for chest, we do four sets of bench press and then four sets of incline, then four sets of flies, and then four sets of cable flies. This is what we do. And so then any ham and egg or wherever you are in small town USA picks up the magazine and goes, Oh, if I want to look like Arnold, I need to do this. So, like, that's where that kind of starts. And it's human nature. I think it's it's a curse that we do. Like, we look at things without investigating things. I just think it's what people do. They still do it. They'll look at somebody and they'll think, oh, well, they're doing this, and and and you know, they're really good at this, so I better do this if I want to do that. I mean, that's just not the case. So many people don't do their due diligence, and it happens all the time. I had a client just this morning tell me that she um was watching somebody in the gym and was doing something and said to herself, maybe I'll start doing that, but then she goes, No, no, no, wait a minute. Um, Rob doesn't have me doing that. I'm just gonna leave that alone. I mean, she made the right decision, most likely. So we just have a tendency to look at things and think, well, if they do that, I should do that. And, you know, that's just not realistic. But that's what was going on with that. And so then a little bit later than that, around the same time, a little bit later, Arthur Jones started Nautilus Corporation. And they weren't just machines, they were also inventors. When I say they, there was a whole team, and I know some of them. I know Dr. Michael Fulton, who was the medical director for Nautilus, and I know some others. But they started getting into researching quality over quantity, and then they came out with a polar opposite idea of how many sets to do, and they totally went to what we call the minimalistic routine. So they literally went to like one set to failure, you know, basically just one for every muscle group. And so they had their research that showed that what they were doing worked. And then out in California, the weeder and company had their research showing that more volume. And essentially the exercise physiologists weren't even brought into the equation back then because, quite frankly, you know, nobody cared. It was like, you know, that that was a cult thing, meaning that like not everybody was strength training for health benefits yet. There was bodybuilders doing it, there was some people doing it for aesthetics, then there was athletes doing it to become better in football or boxing or whatever, but it really wasn't a big thing yet. So the researchers weren't getting hugely involved yet, but we did. And things have been studied now. And the bottom line is that both sides are they have some realistic values to what they do and what they talk about. But the bottom line is this the muscles grow from intensity, they're going to grow from intensity. Nobody can tell you the exact amount of volume that is going to be ideal for you, but we can tell you how much volume you can use to start to see benefits, but we grow from intensity. Now, one of the things I said to the gentleman today when he asked, I said, Well, the biggest question a lot of these people never answer is what is a set? So if you get just say Muscle Beach, California saying you have to do five sets in an exercise to get the benefits. And then in the old days, you had Arthur Jones with Nautilus saying, That is silly. You only do one set. Arthur did a much better job of defining what a set was, whereas the Muscle Beach fellas really didn't. Because what is a set? And I think I was able to make my point when I explained this today. Say, well, let's say you're doing three sets of 10 of an exercise. Now, each set you do of the three was brought to momentary muscular failure. In other words, you could not do another repetition when you reached 10. That's one way. So three sets of 10, all of the sets were taken to momentary muscular failure. You couldn't do 11. You had to stop at 10. Then another guy, Gal, does three sets of 10, but she or he could have done 20 in each set, but she stopped at 10. Is that a set? Well, of course not. So the volume folks never really defined what a set was. So they could get away with a lot more sets because they weren't getting anywhere close to failure. We it's what we would call in the running world garbage miles. Does it hurt them? No, other than they're wasting a lot of time, but essentially they're doing a lot of warm-up sets because now we know in the exercise physiology world, it can't really count as volume unless it is taken within three reps of failure, what we call three reps in reserve. Three R I R rep in reserve. It's got to get that close to failure, or it's really not a set. So they weren't really comparing that at all. Well, now they have. And so now they know that the way the muscles get stronger, and by the way, if you want a tutorial on how this happens, I'm happy to give it to anybody. But basically, there is an architecture change in the muscle where the actin and myosin cross-bridge each other, they slide. What happens is they get partly broken up. So each individual muscle fiber gets a little bit shortened and then not destroyed, but torn and has to come back a little bit stronger. So that happens within the muscle. When you reach failure, you also have a metabolic failure happen. So you have enough lactic acid buildup to where you're changing what happens inside the muscle as far as acidity goes. So that is going on at the same time. So a lot of things are happening around muscle failure, which causes adaptations or changes in the body. And in order to get to that point, the muscles have to be stressed from where they've been stressed before. I mean, you have to think about it and use a little bit of common sense. If you can go and pick up a brick, you can easily move it. Does your body have to do anything to change to move the brick? Does any adaptation have to occur? No, you're just moving the brick. But what happens if your body tries to lift something and it can't? Now it's forced to recruit every single muscle fiber that you have. And there are thousands of muscle fibers inside of a motor neuron, and there's hundreds of motor neurons inside of a muscle belly. So it's recruiting every single one of those motor neurons, which is recruiting every single one of those muscle fibers. And once it's recruited all of it, and basically you're still SOL, you're shit out of luck, you can't move it. It's going to break down, recover, and come back stronger. But in order for it to do that, it has to be stressed further than it was before. Say, well, I'll do more sets to do that. That's that's not what happens. That's not what your body responds to. If you can move the brick once, you come back in 30 minutes, you can move it again, or three minutes, you can move it again. It doesn't respond to that. I'm not saying that you have to stick to one set. I'm saying nobody knows the exact number that is ideal for each person. That comes with experimentation. So I'll wrap up this part by saying that we grow, we get stronger from getting close to failure. We get stronger by intensity. Nothing can trump intensity. All right. The amount of volume depends. You have to train all of your major muscle groups in a week's time. You need to piss pick the best exercises that work for you, as I've talked about before, for each major muscle group. Now, we all have different things going on in us where we need to choose the right exercises. I have people with a lot of different conditions that I got to think about what is the best exercises for them based on their conditions. You have people that have different kinds of physical ailments that require me to work more on the posterior chain, like the rhomboids, the posterior deltoids, the lats, the glutes, because they need to stay more upright because of conditions they might have. Then you're going to have people that need to work more on the anterior side, either based on conditions or muscle imbalances or whatever, or the sport that they do. So there are differences with exercises that we choose, but we do have to train all of the major muscle groups if we want to have a balanced musculoskeletal system. So intensity comes absolutely first. Now, the problem with too many sets, number one is we don't know what too many is. We only know when we stop seeing benefits. So remember what I said about steroids. Steroids are anabolic steroids, they promote growth. The only time growth occurs is when you rest. Catabolism is the opposite of that. Catabolism is when we break something down. That happens during strength training or other intense exercise. We are breaking down the system, we are breaking down the muscle fibers. It gets broken down in training. Now you have to rest. If you're not resting enough, the muscles will not respond. So you need to have proper nutrition. You have to have at least 20 uh 48 hours in between muscle groups for them to recover. You probably have to pay attention to your outside stresses because stress is stress is stress. There, it depends on your hormonal levels, it depends on your age. Although I don't want to, you know, scare people into thinking that older people can't get stronger because it's absolutely not true at all. But we do take a little bit longer to recover. So we have to take into account these considerations to figure out volume. IOs teach people that when you stop seeing benefits, you can evaluate that. If you're not getting stronger, if you've peaked, I mean, that's not a bad thing. But maybe you do need to add something here or there, but you need to do it slowly. You need to figure out what works best for you. And the other thing is you have to remember when people say they're going to the gym for two and a half hours, usually they're bored and they're not doing anything when they're there. I mean, they might get on the elliptical for a while, or maybe they're walking on the treadmill for a while, then they're going back to the water fountain, then they're talking to somebody. So when we talk volume and strength training, it has nothing to do with the amount of time somebody spends in the gym. What volume is, is how many sets they completed while in the gym. Now, most research shows that a really good strength training session is about 18 to 20 sets taken close to failure. If you're doing that, you're having a really good quality workout session. So most people don't have the time to spend all day in the Gym and they don't need to. Now, I finished this part of this with uh this gentleman today by saying, at the same time, I don't try to change other people's workout routines. If they want to go to the gym and do that, I'm never gonna be a person that's going to yuck on their yum. I'm not gonna do that. It's like, okay, fine. I mean, it's better than going to the bars. I mean, go to the gym, work out, you'll figure it out. But when you're really trying to get better and you're really asking questions like this gentleman asked, I'm gonna tell you the truth. Intensity matters. Like, so if you were to back me up against the wall and say, all right, I need an absolute answer on this. Is it better that I do one set taking the outright failure or three sets not taking the failure? It's an easy answer. It's the one set. That's the one where you're going to respond to the strength training. Are you going to have more calories burned and all that, doing more sets and volume? Of course. But that's never the point or should never be the point of a strength training session. Now let me tackle number two. Number two, he asked, isn't it true that, or he didn't say, isn't it true? He said that he had always heard that to tone up, you should do higher reps with lightweight to bulk up or get stronger, you should use heavier weight for lower reps. Okay. That's again a biggie. Um, that one there's absolutely like more. I mean, there's huge research on both. It's just unfortunately with the volume one, nobody knows for sure what is ideal for you again. But with this one, it's like I mean, it's a no-brainer. We get leaner, we get we improve our tone by losing body fat. It has nothing to do with the rep number that we do. The rep number is that's all about intensity. Like it's funny when people say things like, you know, oh, you know, going heavy is hard and all this. And I'm thinking, I don't think you've worked out very long because I can promise you this as far as a metabolic demand, as far as like being brutal, there's nothing worse than 25 reps to failure on a squat. I mean, there is absolutely nothing worse than that. You take anybody that has a lot of experience in weight training, weightlifting, strength training, and that you ask them, so would you want to do five reps, which is going to be really heavy to failure, or 25 reps to failure, they're gonna say five. I mean, yeah, it's heavier, but the metabolic demand, I mean, the the amount of tension you're putting on everything in your cardiorespiratory system with the higher reps, I mean, it makes me laugh when I hear that. I mean, high reps to failure is intense. So, what we now know, and the research has been so clear on this, is anywhere from five to 30, and there's nothing magic about reps, by the way, but they just use this wide range of rep range taken to failure, is going to increase the strength, the endurance, and the hypertrophy of a muscle. All right. There's no change in anything, like how we grow has everything to do with our genetics, our muscle shape, what our somatotype is. Like, I tend to gain muscle kind of easily. I guess I'm lucky for that. I feel I'm lucky for that. So, like, if if I go to failure doing sets, my muscles are gonna grow. If you take an ectomorph who's really skinny, uh, me and this client were talking about a friend we have that's super skinny. No matter what rep range we chose for this guy, he's not gonna really show any noticeable gains in his appearance. He'll get a little stronger, but we're not gonna see a noticeable change in his appearance because it's not in his genetics. It doesn't matter if he's doing high reps or low reps, it does not matter. We get leaner, we show the appearance of tonicity by losing body fat. That's what shows that we gain the muscle by taking the muscles to failure, whether it be five or 30, go to failure. That's how they're gonna get bigger, so to say. And then if we want them to show more, be more vascular, be leaner, we lower our body composition, or we're just naturally already leaner. Has nothing to do with the style. And in a way, I mean, that is such awesome news. If you know that you're just can go to failure and get the benefits, or get, as I said, close to failure. That's all that you have to do. And then I went on to explain to them why we often will choose at least moderate to higher reps with most of our clients, because especially starting out, we don't know them very well. Like with me, I'm gonna take a chance because there are certain things I'm gonna go a little heavier on. There's certain things I'm gonna go a little lighter on, but all the exercises I do, I hit failure or get very, very close. So that doesn't matter. But there are some things I don't really want to go super heavy on. Let me give you an example. So if I do a goblet squat, I could grab a 50 or a 60 pound dumbbell and do pretty good amount of reps with that. Now, what ends up happening potentially is that my core starts to get a little fatigued, my lower back from holding the dumbbell up. Now, if I was holding a lighter dumbbell, which wasn't putting as much stress on my lower back, I could potentially do more repetitions and take the glutes and quads to failure. So I'm gonna make that determination. Now, see, I know myself, so I know I can do that. So, getting back to my example that I told him, we're not gonna really pick like say five reps with most of the clients because that is going to require a heavier load. And we don't know the kind of form that they have. You know, maybe they are gonna push up on that too fast. So I'm not gonna take that chance. I'm not saying heavier weights is riskier, it's it's not, it's we don't know and we don't know how they're gonna respond to that. And if we know they can get the same benefits from doing a lighter load for more reps, then that's what we're going to do. So ideally, I tend to pick around 10 to 15 reps for most people. And when they can reach 15 or a little bit more, I'm going to increase the weight because the objective is to increase the intensity, not the duration with that. Now, another caveat to that is it's hard. I mean, some people go to the gym and grab the lightweights and do three sets of 10 and stop because it's easy and they, you know, they're checking it off their list. It's like, oh, I I did it, I went to the gym, and sure, you know, it is better than nothing. But like it's also what people do because a lot of people do like the path of least resistance. I mean, not every client I have can get close to failure. I mean, some quit way before it, you know, we we encourage them, we count the five, you know, when it starts to burn, they stop and we try to keep them moving. We want them to get the failure. Some people you wouldn't even know or is reaching failure. I mean, they just have like this stoic look on their face. This guy's actually one of them. I mean, he's pretty new, and it's like, I know his quads were smoking, and he was around 18 reps today, but man, his facial appearance was not changing. So, it for some people, it's easier to get them there than others. But you know, hey, that's my job. I've got to try to do the best I can with each person and try to encourage them to push themselves a little bit harder so they can get the benefits because that's what we want. We want the benefit. Sure, it hurts now, but by doing that, it's going to make us feel so much better. So I'm looking at the time in this podcast and I realize this is such an important topic, and I could keep going on this. And I don't even feel like I 100% answered the question because this is such an important topic. So I'm sure I will come back to it, but I really do appreciate the question. Real quick to sum it up, as far as volume goes, quality is always going to trump quantity. Quality comes in the form of intensity, quantity comes in the form of volume. Number two, there is no rep range for for cutting up and no rep range for getting bulkier. That just does not exist. We get more cut by having the muscles there and decreasing our body fat. All right, keep the questions coming. And until next time, be max fit and be max well. Thanks everybody for listening to today's show. I want to ask you to please hit automatic download from wherever you get your podcast from. It really helps me and it really helps the show. Now I'd like to take a second to thank our sponsors. 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