Er... confusion on no of sets for 5s

[imported_groovemeister]

Hi all - I'm not new to training, been doing 18 months seriously (and played around a lot in the gym before that), but new to HST - and I have a question about volume.

Looking at the article For Dummies, it looks like volume increases as the weeks go by. As I move into sets of 5s, it's considered pretty normal to do 3 sets per exercise, which mean 3 times the recovery, and bearing in mind that 5s take longer to rrecover from, and THEN when you include warm ups too then that's a lot of time and it's best not to spend over an hour douing weights... am I missing something? I feel I must be.

Cheers guys!

 

[Lol]

Groovemeister, welcome!

Re the volume thing, it depends on whether you are viewing volume in terms of sets or reps. If you look at if from the reps perspective, you're doing 1 set for 15s, 2 sets for 10s and 3 sets for 5s. The volume is dropping slightly for the 5s compared with the 10s but the number of reps you are performing over the whole cycle is pretty much the same.

I agree that 5s take a bit longer to complete because of the rest between sets, but if you pick a selection of good compound exercises (say 10 at the most, less if you miss out isos for arms) you should be able to get it done in an hour. The best way to save time is to streamline your workout and also to superset some of your exercises.

If you do 3 full-body workouts a week, recovery time (meaning recuperation after your workout) is plenty for 15s, 10s and 5s. Not going to failure really helps with this.

Don't forget that you don't need to do warm-ups for all your exercises during 10s and 5s, just for the first exercise for each main body part.

 

[style]

You can stick with one or two sets if you like. Regardless, your workout should take less than an hour.

Squats
Close grip under arm pull ups
Bench
Deadlift
Bent over row
military press

This is an awesome workout that could be done quite quickly.