What your Reps and Rest say about your Workouts

March 1, 2011 5 Comments

If you checkout a lot of workouts you will notice that for the most part they share particular exercises. The reason for this is the basics work, they have worked for years, and they continue to work. In fact be skeptical of workouts that aren’t built upon the basics like squats, bench presses, dead lifts, barbell curls, skull crushers and military presses. Despite workouts being build upon the same exercises trainers constantly tell you to change up your workouts every two to three weeks, and all sorts of people use these same exercises to get different results ranging from fitness models to power lifters. Both variety and varied results are achieved by changes in the repetitions done and the rest between sets.

The key to Power

Power is essential to fitness. Enough of this jazzercising in our living rooms to a repetitive beat, there is nothing like an improvement in your power to improve your fitness. Sure getting lean is a great accomplishment but you don’t want to sacrifice your power for it. Power is achieved by lifting very heavy weights for 3-6 repetitions and taking longer rest periods (three to four minutes). Now before you panic and go running to the treadmill power doesn’t always mean an increase in size, you also need a high calorie diet and a long time spent focusing on power lifting to develop the type of size you see guys display in strongman competitions. Sure the scale may go up but your clothes will fit the same or more likely better. Work a few power elements into your workout say with the bench press, dead lift and squat and watch the weight you rack go up and up and enjoy the benefits you will feel during your other workouts.

Bodybuilding Sets

Typically body builders, in the search for symmetry, size and definition do 12-18 repetitions with shorter rest periods, ranging from sixty seconds to three minutes.  If you are looking to get a great beach body (and come on who isn’t) these should be the basis of your workouts. To get more fat burning effects go with the higher end of the rep range and keeps the rests shorter. Because these workouts cause an increase in muscle size you should expect the scale to move up, a clean diet will keep the increase to a minimum but cutting your calories to low will not provide enough energy to fully complete this style of workout and you increase the risks of injury and overtraining.

The shred and pump sets

If you want to shed more fat than you could spending hours on a treadmill do a high rep short set workout routine. Keep your reps in the 25 – 50 range (yep I said 50) and build the workout on supersets, trisets, and quadsets so your moving from exercise to exercise which will get the fat burning. The high reps give you that pump you show up at the gym for in the first place. These types of workouts are great for leaning out on a calorie restricted diet and are the “secret” to those infomercial magical programs.

For overall fitness you want to incorporate all three types of sets into your workouts. You can easily do this by dedicating a couple months to one type then switching to another and then to another. You can even incorporate all three into one workout by starting with power, and then moving to bodybuilding sets and finishing with the high rep/low rest sets. You can also use these set type to build a program to achieve your short term fitness goals. Want to look better at the beach this summer start with power sets during winter, move to body building sets and a lower calorie diet during late winter/early spring and finish with a calorie restricted, low carbohydrate diet and high rep low rest sets as summer gets closer.

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