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As you go about your muscle building back workouts, one of the most important things that you need to take into consider is how many sets and reps you're doing for each exercise. These are two key factors that will determine the type of results you're getting, so if you don't have them laid out properly, your results will not be as great as what you're looking for.
Determining the reps and sets that you're going to perform is highly dependent on not only what your goal is, but also on how well your body recovers and tolerates volume.
If you know that you are someone who struggles with recovering after a hard workout session, going into the gym and blasting the back with 50 or more sets may not be in your best interests. Instead, you'd do better on a moderate volume program that has you working closer to the 20-30 set total range.
It's important that you come to learn your body over time as you go about your workouts and see what it can recover from and what renders you useless for days after it's been completed. Let's take a look at some of the main issues that you should also keep in mind when figuring out your reps and sets for your muscle building back workouts.
Seeing Maximum Strength Gains
If you're someone who is looking to experience a maximum strength progression with your workout program, it's going to be vital that your main focus is adding more and more weight to each lift you do. While you will always get some size gains when you see great strength progress as well, the two are not always in direct relationship with each other.
Training for maximum size and training for maximum strength is slightly different because size requires a higher rep range while strength requires a lower rep range. This isn't to say you won't get bigger training with very low reps - if proper food intake is there you definitely will, but you won't get as big as if you were using higher rep training as well.
So if your goal is strength though, work in rep ranges of 5-8 and perform 3-5 sets of each exercise.
Note for strength gains you should also lean towards fewer exercises total per workout since if you fatigue the muscles too much, you won't be able to get back into the gym after the 48 hours of rest. Heavy training is very hard on the CNS and if you overdo it, it can be days before you're back in the gym again.
Getting Instant Size With Isolation Movements
Now, if size and strength is your goal with your muscle building back workouts but you are willing to slightly compromise on strength gains to see more size, then you're going to want to consider taking the rep range slightly higher with your isolated movements.
If you're doing one arm rows or reverse fly's, bring those up to the 10-12 rep range, using a weight that still brings you to fatigue. Perform 3-4 sets when using this protocol. This will cause a higher build-up of muscular byproducts and help promote an instant pump that you can see and feel.
Creating The Best Of Both Worlds
So now, if you want to get the most effective workout possible, you should make the best of both worlds. Perform some heavy rep training on your compound lifts to evoke a very high gain in strength and then combine this with some work in the higher rep range for either compound or isolation exercises.
This will hit the body from a few different angles and really get those muscles sitting up and growing quickly.
So keep these points in mind as you go about your muscle building back workouts. Getting the sets and reps in line is the best way to make sure that you're seeing the results you're looking for.
For more help on your quest to add size, please see my full comprehensive program on how to build muscle.
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