How many sets per bodypart?

[DanielBishop]

I've heard it said that you shouldn't train biceps and triceps for more than 9 sets.

What about chest, back and shoulders? (I don't do legs because of a knee injury)....

Lately I've been doing up to 12-15 sets for the major bodyparts....

.... how much is recommended?

For chest, for example.... I do bench press (or dumbbell press), incline bench (or dumbbell), sometimes decline and something like cable (or dumbbell) flyes to finish it off. With those sort of exercises, how many sets should I be doing?

One real big guy at a gym in Toronto once told me not to do too many sets.

 

[Citruscide]

Ok... I guess I'll try to field this one.

First off... you must do some warm up sets... help get some blood flow to the areas you wish to train... and it also gets the tendons and ligaments ready for you workout.

I typically don't do more than 5-8 WORKSETS per body part. The higher amount designated for bigger body parts (Legs, Chest, Back) while the smaller designated for arms and such.

A WORK set is a set to absolute positive failure... that is where you are trying like an animal to get the weight up, but can't... and you keep trying until you can't even try.

A warm up set is typically around 10 reps for me.

Do it that way, and you won't have to do more than around 5 worksets... hell, for chest today, I only did 4 HARDCORE sets and I can barely lift my arms.

C-ditty

 

[DanielBishop]

Yeah, I usually do a couple of light warmup sets for each bodypart.... like, I do it before I start my main sets for chest, but not before each exercise.

And I try to go to failure every working set.... of course sometimes I can't go to ABSOLUTE failure, since I train alone and don't want to DIE.... but where I can, I push myself as far as possible.

Thanks for the reponse. Maybe I'm doing too much?