No Nonsense Muscle Building with Vince DelMonte
Lesson #8: A guide to choosing the right number of reps and sets
Hey guys, welcome to another coaching lesson today. I am going to introduce you to a super cool technique. It is not something that I invented. It is something that I’ve used for a while and it has helped me increase my weight from the low end of the scale up to the high end of the scale, and it is going to help you decide what weight you should use. You guys email me all the time and you ask me how much weight should I use. To be honest, I have no idea. That is something you have to figure out.
I am going to give you a cool technique called pyramiding. Pyramiding is designed to help you increase your weight throughout the course of the set. And what it is designed to do is help you increase your weights at least five pounds from week to week.
Let us use this as an example. Let us say you are doing full body workouts. Full body workouts are a great way to apply the pyramiding rep scheme. And what you would do is you take four sets per muscle group and you would use some sort of scheme. The number of reps is as important as following the concept here. So you could go 12 reps, 10 reps, 8 reps, 6 reps, or you could use the lower rep range like 8 reps, 6 reps, 4 reps, 2 reps. The basic premises is that every set gets heavier and heavier leading to an all step.
Your final set should be a set that you have never done before. You should achieve what is called a PB, a personal bet, so you should lift a weight you have never done before.
So here is what happens. This week, you have achieved four sets of six with 25 pounds. Next week, your goal is to finish at 30 pounds, finish five pounds heavier. So the next week you go to the gym, you start off with the chest presses. Instead of starting with the 10’s, you start on with the 15’s. So four sets of 12, four sets of 10, four sets of 8, and then you are going to grab your 30’s and you are going to go to four sets of six.
The week after, again you are starting with the 20’s this time. 20’s, 25’s, 30’s, in three weeks from now, you increase your weights from at all level set with the 25, so now you are going to be doing all that through 35. Imagine that 12 to 24 weeks from now, you have started down by 10’s, and you are actually going to be moving up to 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. Obviously, you are going to reach a point where you can’t continue with the rep scheme but let us worry about that when we get there.
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