SETS

Generally in the Basic Training Program I recommend doing 4 sets of each bodybuilding exercise except where otherwise specified. I believe this is the best system for several reasons :

1. You need to do at least 4 sets in order to have the volume of training necessary to fully stimulate all the available muscle fiber. If you do more sets per exercise your total training volume will be so great that you risk over training.

2. Doing 4 sets per exercise for a total of 12 sets per body part in the Basic Training Program and 20 sets in Advance Training enables you to do a sufficient variety of exercises to work all the areas of a body part .

3. The experience of five decades of bodybuilders has proved that the maximum amount of weight you can handle that allows you to just make it through 4 sets of an exercise will stimulate the muscles and make them grow.

There is a difference in how much training small muscles require compared to large muscles or muscle groups. For example, If I'm training my back that doesn't involve just one muscle , there are many different muscles in the back , such as lats , rhomboids , traps , spinal erectors of the lower back and each of these areas has to be trained specifically. The same is true for the thighs. The thighs consist of four powerful quadriceps muscles as well as the adductors at thre inside of the upper leg. To fully train this area , you need both power and isolation movements , you have to hit the different heads at different angles and you aren't going to accomplish this with just a few sets.

In training smaller muscles like the biceps and triceps , on the other hand , fewer total sets are needed because those muscles are just not that complex. You can get a complete biceps workout doing a total of about 9 to 12 sets. For example, whereas most bodybuilders would do 16 to 20 total sets to work the thighs. The rear deltoid is even smaller muscle and generally 4 to 5 sets for the posterior deltoid head is enough. However muscle phsyiology also comes into play. The biceps are the fastest recuperating muscles so if you feel like training them using higher sets they are still able to recover. And the calf muscles which are relatively small are designed to do virtually endless repetitions when you walk or run so you can get great results training them with a relatively high number of sets.

But don't worry about trying to remember exactly which muscle should be trained with how many sets right off the bat. I've taken all of this into consideration in the exercise program recommendation coming up in my later posts.