Have you ever used a personal trainer?

[SupDock]

Originally Posted by Bearcat

I'm no expert, but it's a matter of endurance training vs maximizing muscle growth.

A million push ups won't get you Arnold's chest, but of course will still grow some muscle and will be high on endurance (included cardio, I'd think). If you wanted to max out muscle growth though, you would bench press with a weight that only allowed for anywhere from 3-12 reps (the standard I think is like 3-6, but there's a lot of overlap as 8-12 is still perfectly ok for good muscle growth).

Solely on the basis of muscle growth, the science says anything beyond about 5 sets in one day for one muscle group probably won't matter (wasted reps) as you're just annihilating that muscle, and you can do anywhere from 10-20 sets per week per muscle group.

That's why people do the arm day, leg day, etc... they want the most bang for their buck, which means doing 5 sets for biceps two days a week, 5 for triceps, 5 for chest, etc. They say twice a week is optimal so you aren't going a full week between working out the same muscle group. I'd think the more full body stuff would be good multiple times as you're not hitting one area hard (such as rows), where doing curls everyday or more than about 10 sets per week would probably be a waste for muscle gains.

I personally have three workouts a week where I concentrate on a couple major groups per day... sort of an arm day with a lot of arm stuff, but I do some arms on another day as well.

I work in some endurance/lower weight as well... it amounts to about 3 hours per week not including stretching, plus a few walks/jogs a week that are about 35 minutes each.

Strength training is around 5 reps to failure. Hypertrophy is in the 8-20 range. For time reasons I use 10-12.

[loochy]

Originally Posted by SupDock

Strength training is around 5 reps to failure. Hypertrophy is in the 8-20 range. For time reasons I use 10-12.

Indeed, but that's not absolute. You'll still get hypertrophy from low rep work and you'll still get strength from higher rep work. Also keep in mind that this means lifting to failure (or reasonably near it).

I just wanted to clear that up for noobs.