How many sets and reps should I do for my goals?

There's a chart that floats around the academic and internet worlds which is supposed to answer the question of “how should I lift for different goals?” It usually looks something like the one below, though sometimes it will have a Russian's name on it, because everyone knows all the true genius of fitness lies in the Eastern Bloc, just look at Putin with his shirt off.

For almost all lifters, this chart is a load of old bollocks. It refers to experienced lifters. For beginners – where a 'beginner” is someone who, given good rest and food, can progress from one workout to the next, and almost all people in gyms are beginners - the reps and sets aren't so important, and certainly the tempo of the lifts don't matter much at all. For example, it's been shown that the number of sets you do doesn't matter much.

The body changes because you ask it to do more than it did before. As a beginner, before you were doing nothing, now you are doing something, something is more than nothing, so your body adapts - you get stronger, and if you change your diet, you will get overall bigger or smaller. 

Exactly what that something is that you do isn't that big a deal. For example, even Zumba or riding a bicycle would improve the barbell squat strength of a previously sedentary person - because in each case your legs are doing more than they did before, which was nothing. Much the same applies for other fitness goals, by the way; a sedentary person just lifting weights will improve their cardiovascular fitness, and just doing jazzercise will improve their strength. 

For the beginner, the reason to choose a particular rep range or series of exercises is not that they're better than something else at improving their cardiovascular fitness, strength, muscular size or whatever - rather the person is laying the foundations for future training. 

For example, let's say that today you can squat the bar, and after six months of BodyPump doing sloppy half squats while hating the fitness instructor for her cellulite-free thighs you find that you can do a good form deep squat with 50kg. But your friend just started with the 20kg barbell and worked her way up to squatting 50kg. Her squat would be technically better than yours because she's got more practice in the movement. And she would reach a 75kg squat before you did.

The important thing for a beginner is to learn the basic movements of squat, push, pull, and so on - and to practice them regularly, trying to do lift more weight, or the same weight more times, in each session. Just 1kg or 1 rep is more, and you will force your body to adapt.

The exact sets and reps aren't important. Obviously lifting weights you can lift for less than 3 reps means you are likely to be sloppy in your movement, more than 20 reps is usually not more of a stress than 20 or less; but outside those extremes, most will work just as well for beginners. The important thing is that consistent effort over time gets results.

How many sets and reps should I do? More than you did before. That's what beginners need to do. I know everyone reading this is advanced, honest. I mean those other people.  

Personal trainers and aimless sessions

The valiant and competent PT stands ready to
catch her 1kg dumbbell
should she fail on the 687th rep

Sometimes people will look around their gyms and ask me why PT sessions consist of random exercises with neither PT nor client taking notes of what they're doing. There's a method to this madness. 

Firstly, most PTs have 0-3 clients. Up to around 6 clients, the PT can just remember their previous personal best lifts and go from there to make sure that they're pushed in each session - remember that if you do more than you did before you'll progress; it's better if this "more" is structured, but you can go a surprisingly long way without much plan simply by actually making an effort; and clients generally demand novelty, thus the randomness. And with 0-3 or even sometimes 6 clients, the PT can keep all this stuff in their head. Get 12-18 clients and the PT has to start writing things down, though. 

With all that, bear in mind that many clients don't actually care about progress. If you have them puffing like a steam engine for half an hour, they're happy. Magazines and Biggest Loser and a heap of movies of people doing pushups in the rain while someone shouted at them have told them that simply being thrashed is progress, or if not progress is sufficient atonement for their "sins" of sitting on their bums eating crappy food most of the week. "Okay, today you will do 1,000 jumping jacks, I'm going for coffee, leave $30 on the table on the way out." 

"You did 5 pushups last time, 6 pushups this time, this is progress, well done" is an alien concept to them. This is especially true when you come to the "but I just want to tone up" crowd (which has both male and female members). 

Remember that physical training can change how you look, feel and perform. Many people begin poor in all three. These kinds of unstructured workouts with no real progression will, so long as the person is pushed, raise them from poor to okay in two of the three, and all three if they improve their diet, too. If you've been looking, feeling and performing poorly for the last several years, simply being okay will feel amazing. 

A structured workout with progression in combination with a good diet is necessary to improve how you look, feel and perform from okay to good. But many clients will be thrilled just to be okay as even that's a vast improvement for them. And for that, just getting them working hard and sweating for half an hour a couple of times a week is enough. 

Let's not be too disdainful of this, since the person with this kind of session with a trainer is better off than they would be on their own. Most people on their own don't progress the resistance, speed, time, etc, they just come in and read the paper on the bike or do a few sets of lat pulldowns lurching their body back, etc. Simply by being given a routine working their whole body and pushed a bit harder each session they get results they'd never get on their own.

Only a minority of clients will want something more. This small number grows if the trainer uses sessions to educate the person. But most PTs don't, they provide only the service demanded. Bring 'em in, thrash 'em, sign 'em off, see you next time, next! Again, this is an improvement on what most people do on their own - they will at least see progression from poor to okay. 

Clients with no real goal except to be thrashed for half an hour a couple of times a week bore me, so I never recruit them, if given them by a manager I try to change their minds, and if that fails I shuffle them off to other trainers. But for many trainers this kind of client is their bread and butter.