Dr.Darden mentioned
A Single Set Story
Back when I began lifting in the mid-70s at the tender age of 12, the only training system I or anyone else in this one-horse town knew about was 3 sets of 10 for each exercise. We never trained to failure, but just used weights that seemed comfortably heavy. If course, there were many other training systems around even then, but news travels slowly. My friends and I made good gains this way which probably says more for teenage hormones than exercise methodology.
By the mid-80s I was in school in the Big City and for the first time came upon the single set, train to failure idea, promoted mostly in Ellington Dardenās books. These books were certainly convincing and seemed to make sense, so I tried it. Wow! I had never had the kind of muscles that āpumpedā when I worked out, but now even a single set made each muscle group practically burst. My strength shot up, muscles seemed bigger every day ā oh man, i thought, Iām going to look like Sergio Oliva!
Hereās an example of Dardenās stuff:
Needless to say, I never became a threat to Sergio. After about two or three months of this strain 'til you puke lifting, my strength stagnated and then started back down. Now, if youāre familiar with single set advocates, you know that they attribute lack of progress to only two things: overtraining or not trying hard enough. So I experimented with layoffs; they didnāt help. And goodness knows, I tried harder and harder, using every high-intensity technique you can think of, as well as grimaces of effort which often stunned the university weight room into silence. Nothing.
So gradually I drifted back into more moderate training with multiple sets of each exercise, and resumed my usual pattern of on-again, off-again progress. But my experience with single sets stuck with me, and I wondered about it for years; it worked well for a while, so why didnāt it keep working? It wasnāt until years later that I found the answer.
In the mid-1990ās I bought a book by Leo Costa called Big Beyond Belief: Serious Growth III.
Here: http://www.rogerhardin.com/downloads/BigBeyondBelief-eBook.pdf
Mr. Costa had become somewhat infamous a few years before with his first Serious Growth manual which I also have, which advocates three-times-a-day lifting. In Big Beyond Belief, Leo related a typical scenario of the multiple set lifter switching to single sets which exactly followed my own experience: dramatic gains for a short while followed by stagnation and loss. I had never seen anyone else discuss this, so I was favorably inclined toward his explanation of why it happens. More to the point, I patterned by own training system after Leoās and found that it worked.
There are really two fundamental concepts at the heart of Leoās program. The first of these is that weight training does not simply stimulate your skeletal muscles; rather, your entire system is involved and feels the stress. Anyone who has vomited or gotten a diarrhea attack after a heavy lifting session can see the truth in this. And while the effect on your internal works is seen solely in a negative light by the heavy duty advocates, Leo says it is not quite so simple. According to Leo, your bodyās internal systems can be either depressed or made more efficient by training, neither result is permanent, as your ability to adapt to stress changes continually.
The second concept of great importance is that of ālag timeā: the fact that while your body is in a continual state of adaptation to stress, these adaptations take some time, usually measured in several weeks. The example which Leo gives is that of going on a diet, which most of us can relate to. When you restrict calories, your metabolism continues to function as Norman, er, normal for a week or two, so you lose weight; but by about the third week, your body adjusts to the fewer calories and lowers your metabolism to compensate, and little or no fat is lost. Sound familiar?
Leo says that weight training works the same way: when you go on a new routine, the body has to struggle to adapt and as a result must overcompensate. But after a few weeks, the body gets comfortable with the training and doesnāt have the same compulsion to change.
So in a nutshell, the training routine must take into account that the body will, in a relatively short period of time, adapt to almost any stimulus; and that when adaptation occurs, progress stops. In other words, the body must continually be kept off balance and uncomfortable to keep making gains in strength or muscle size. Leo makes the case that the most effective way to do this is not by cycling poundages or taking layoffs, but by varying your training volume in a predetermined way; in simple terms, doing more or fewer sets over time.
A quick aside about repetition ranges. Leo says that bodybuilders should vary their repetition ranges, but in Big Beyond Belief, he says the strength athlete should only use a range of 1-3 reps. However, it bears pointing out that in his earlier Serious Growth, he advocates varying the rep count for strength athletes as well: over the course of three workouts he suggests using 4-5 reps per set the first day, 3-4 rep sets the second day, and 1-2 rep sets for the third workout. Personally I havenāt experimented with varying the rep count ā which is really another way of saying varying the poundage ā but some of you might want to try both systems and compare the results.