Reps and Sets Revealed

At the gym, you're likely to see someone running around from exercise to exercise like a chicken with his head cut off while some body-builder type spends an hour doing the same exercise over and over. Which approach is better? What do you need to do to get the most from your workout?

If you are a complete gym novice, take heart. You'll have it all explained for you here.

Reps refers to repetitions or the number of times you perform an exercise. If you then take a short break and repeat the exercise, each group of repetitions is a set. That's easy enough.

How many reps and how many sets should you do? Like most aspects of strength training, it depends on your goals and the amount of time you have. Let's look at some general guidelines.

If your goal is to get big muscles, you need to use enough weight so that you can only perform five to seven reps of an exercise before you can no longer keep good form or lift the weight. The latter is referred to as exercising to the point of failure. The last thing most women want to do, including me, is to develop big, bulky muscles. If you fall into this category, read on.

If you want to develop strong, toned, lean and well-defined muscles, you should use enough weight so that you can perform eight to 12 reps of your exercise before failure. When you can do 12 reps in each of your sets, it's time to increase your weights.

This leads to the obvious question, "How many sets do I need to do?" The general guideline is that the optimal number of sets is anywhere between two and five. If you only do one set, you are not working the muscles effectively. Remember, you are trying to push them beyond what what is needed to weed your garden or pick up a laundry basket. Beyond five sets, you start to experience the law of diminishing returns. It's OK for body builders with specific goals to do lots of sets, but for the rest of us, it's really just a waste of time.

Start out slowly. You may want to start with two sets at first and increase to three or more as you build strength. The more sets you do, the more you work the muscles to increase strength. I used to do a lot of exercises but only two sets of each. When I doubled my sets to four, I noticed a dramatic increase in muscle strength and definition. I may switch this around for variety and do three sets and more exercises or five sets and fewer exercises sometimes.

Variety is good. At some point, if you do the same thing over and over, your muscles get too accustomed to the activity and they no longer need to work as hard. You stop seeing improvement Change things up.

Finally, you need to consider the break between sets. Too many people start wandering around, chatting with their gym friends or playing with their iPods between sets. If you give the muscles too long a break, the next set will not give you any added benefit. It's like you're doing the first set again. You need to build on each set. That said, you should take no longer than a 30-second break between sets. You will not only work your muscles much harder much faster, but you'll also be building up your endurance.

Keep in mind, if you do lots of sets with little or no break between sets, you may not be able to lift as much weight. That's good. It means you are working your muscles efficiently and effectively. The number of pounds you lift is irrelevant. What matters is that you are making the muscles work harder than they are used to.

Don't be impressed by the guys at the gym pumping 80-pound dumbbells. They are the dumbbells. They usually don't use good form, can't control the weights and take a five-minute break between sets. Sure they get big muscles...eventually. They also usually spend long hours at the gym when they could get the same results in half the time.

If you're like me, you like to get in, work out hard and get out.