People and fitness clients often ask me about the number of sets that they should be doing while exercising.
A “set” is the number of times you perform a group of reps or repetitions. Here’s a quick video with everything you need to know:
The number of sets can largely be influenced by your goals and the amount of time you have available. More than 70% of the benefits of an exercise are realized after just the first set. If you are pressed for time and your goals don’t have you wanting to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, this is great news. After two sets, you’ve realized almost all the benefits you stand to gain. The gains on the third and fourth sets are fairly minimal, and are only important to fitness enthusiasts that are looking for maximized results.
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Thanks Davey for the info —- Glenn
Three sets of an exercise is plenty. What I see is that some less sophisticated exercisers will do an almost infinite number of sets of one exercise, most typically the bench press, the favorite exercise of young male lifters. Rather than this approach it would be far better to do three sets and move on to other chest exercises, like flyes for example.
Does this include warm up sets. I’m assuming that when you say that you’re getting 70% of your results from the first set, that’s the first set where your muscles fail after 8 reps. Please do correct me if I’m wrong.
I usually do a warm up set followed by 2 or 3 max weight sets, that is the max weight that I can put on and still do 6-8 reps.
Honestly I’m not even sure if warm up sets are necessary, but it’s what I was taught when I started lifting and what I’ve always done, so I stick with it.
Warming up is very necessary. Once a body part is warmed up there is no need to do a “warm-up set” for every exercise. BTW, cooling down is equally important.
I’m wondering about something. Previously you said drop sets increase mass a lot. But here and in other places you imply a small number of sets with heavy weight is the best. Which one is better?
Davey, how much time to you recommend in between sets, if I am maximizing the weights and do 3 sets?