Jesus. Some of these set totals are insane! Even on gear. Blows my fucking mind.
I enjoy lifting and moving weight around but my mentality is get in and then get out. Do as little as possible to trigger growth so I can start the recovery process asap. The more I do, the longer it takes to recover, and the less time my muscles will have to adapt and grow in size / strength.
I agree with this.
If you're doing a lot of sets per body part, you're either wasting your time or not seeing results as good as you could be due to over-training.
Lifting is a tiny fraction of time in our pursuit of increasing strength and or size. The majority of our time (95+%) is spent resting / nutrition. That's where our minds should be at. Not marathon lifting sessions.
Do your 2-4 non fatiguing warm up sets and then have at it for one all out set. Explode on the positive, slow on the negative, go to real 100% failure. Maybe a little rest pause, forced negatives, or even a descending set as intensifiers. But don't overdo it. Every workout, just overload your muscles with either more weight or at least one more rep than you did the workout prior. If doing it this way, you can even train each muscle group more frequently and trigger growth more times each year because of the lower volume - triggering growth from the get-go and then stopping to let your body recover. I'm a fan of Mike Mentzer and Dante's Doggcrapp training philosophies.
Quality vs quantity. Less is more. That's what it boils down to me.
