Reps, Sets & Upper/Lower Body Workouts (3 min read)
Let’s delve deeper into structuring your workouts and really get into the sets, reps, and which muscles to target. Now that you have optimized your workouts and compacted your strength training into 2 or 3 sessions per week, let’s discuss what to do in those sessions. Ideally, you want to target each muscle group once or twice each week – twice for maximum adaptation and once for a more sustained approach.
With the limited number of exercises you can do, we’ll discuss which exercises to select in the upcoming series. We structure the workouts for our members like so:
2x per week:
- 1 Upper body session – Push & Pull
- 1 Lower body session – Legs & Core
3x per week:
- 1 Upper body session – Push & Pull
- 1 Lower body session – Legs & Core
- 1 Full body workout
If you’re training twice a week, you can maximize your exercises with each workout. When performing push (e.g., push-ups, bench press, etc.) and pull movements (pull-ups, dumbbell rows, etc.), you can alternate them with minimal rest, as opposing muscle groups are working – so while one muscle group works, the other rests, and vice versa.
If you’re training 3 times per week, the full body workout will allow you to target each muscle group a second time, fostering increased adaptation (increased strength, muscle tissue, and improved bone density).
Now that you know what muscles to target in your workouts, let’s talk about reps and sets. The number of reps you perform in any given exercise will dictate whether you are primarily working on strength, increasing muscle mass, or muscular endurance. All are equally important, so we like to mix it up and change the rep range each week. This shocks the body further and allows our members to tap into all three areas of strength. We typically perform 3 sets of each exercise, but will sometimes go with 4-5 for increased volume in a particular movement. We find 3 sets to be the sweet spot for each exercise.
- 1-6 reps: Focuses on absolute strength. Increased nervous system engagement is required to recruit as many muscles as possible for the movement (e.g., a 1 or 3 rep max deadlift).
- 6-12 reps: Mixes strength with muscular endurance. This is the optimal rep range for increasing muscle mass (muscle hypertrophy) as you are causing maximum damage to the muscle tissue, which then heals and rebuilds stronger.
- 12+ reps: Enters the muscular endurance range. You will be working with light to moderate weight (depending on weight) until reaching muscle fatigue.
You should try to mix these different reps in. Typically, you would do lower reps at the beginning with the bigger exercises, then increase the reps with smaller movements to add the muscle fatigue component.
In the next series, we’ll be talking about exercises – what to pick, why, and what the differences are between exercises. Not all exercises are created equal. We’ll also discuss how we structure our workouts and why we change the reps and exercises every 4-6 weeks.
Thank you for reading our blog post, we hope the information was helpful.
Please comment below or get in touch if you have any questions.
Disclaimer: If you are currently experiencing severe/chronic pain, then you should be consulting an allied health professional (physiotherapist/osteopath etc.)
