Introduction
In this part we’re going to be going over Sets and the different ways they influence can influence your training. As mentioned in the previous video on reps, A Set can be defined as a series of reps done consecutively to a previously determined range.
A series – Priority for the session
The way you organize your sets in a session can really let you shift priority to where it needs to go for the day. Generally speaking your first movement (movements) of the day will be the most important. Now that’s not to take any value away from the rest of your workout, that’s just to highlight the fact that you want to be efficient in how you spend your limited time and energy during a session. You want to have the hardest, most important, and often most taxing movements early on in the workout. That way you can taper off the intensity as you go along through the rest of the workout. This also has the added mental benefit of knowing that it only gets easier as you go alone. For our programming and your educational purposes we can refer to this first exercise or exercises as your “A series”.
B series – Accessory movements
The middle (or body) of your workout is where you would follow that up with some accessory movements. These are exercises that compliment the A series and/or goal of the session, but without being as demanding on you. An example of this could be doing a set of Squats in the A series and moving on to something like a Split Squat and Lying Leg Curls. You went from doing this Bilateral Compound exercise to exercises where you are now using less weight, focusing on only one leg at a time, and have a machine to make it safer for you to focus on keeping a high level of effort. For our purposes we can refer to this middle part of the workout as your “B series”.
C Series – Isolation and/or Corrective Exercises
Finally you get to the end of the workout. This is where you’re already pretty tired and you’ve gotten most of the hard stuff out of the way. Now we want to cap off this workout by making sure you’re doing stuff to keep your body healthy and doing stuff that leaves you feeling good as you finish up. Generally this is where you would have your smaller more isolated movements and/or your corrective exercises. These can be done to really bring some concentrated attention to
areas you were focusing on earlier but in an even more isolated or regressed manner, or to spend some time on exercises that will make sure you stay injury free and can help improve things like posture and alignment. We will refer to these as your “C series”
Time Under Tension (TUT)
So as you can see in the way you set up your A, B and C series, not only is the intensity and difficulty tapering off as you work your way through, but the movements also start bigger and heavier and end up becoming more isolated and regressed as you get closer to the end. If done right, things like this will really let you zero in on bringing up strength in a movement or an area of your body, or even just allowing you to concentrate more attention to an area that may be lagging behind. Organizing your sets in this way not only from day to day but across weeks or months really lets you get the most out of your training. You can manage your total volume of work, how it’s spread out across regions of your body or training certain movements so that you can minimize conflicts between training sessions and stay productive the entire time. Remember the guiding principles we should always keep in the forefront of our minds: Quality over quantity.
Tying things back to the lessons we learned in the video on reps, these two factors need to be especially considerate of each other. Manipulating these two variables together will let you really effectively manage your total Time Under Tension (TUT). For example, if you wanted to spend more overall time improving your Squat, you could increase the number of reps, play around with the tempo – which will be covered in-depth in the next video, or even increase the number of sets. So for example, instead of doing 3 sets of 6-8 reps of your squat, you could spend more time and effort towards progressing it simply by increasing it to 4 or 5 sets. With that simple change, you’re now putting in that much more work on your Squats (an extra 6-16 reps per workout to be exact, which adds up over time)
Asad Sayal
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Asad introduces the importance of pre-designing your workout so that you can make the most out of your time in the gym and reach your goals quicker. He explores the range of variables this course will dive deeper into such as sets, reps, tempo, rest and load.