RECENT SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE IN FAVOR OF ONE-SET TRAINING
By John Little

One of the biggest dilemmas facing bodybuilders these days is how many sets to perform. "Should I do 20 sets or 12 sets?" "Should I use one set or multiple sets?" And "Aren't more sets required to stimulate additional size and strength gains as you get stronger?"

The answer to these questions depends upon whom you ask; if you ask your personal trainer or local muscle man, they'll tell you that you need more sets, additional exercises and more time in the gym (after all, most personal trainers get paid by the hour and most local muscle men have no life outside of the gym, devoting upwards of 12 hours a week to the task of trying to build their bodies). However, if you ask an exercise physiologist who has looked into the matter thoroughly, you will be told that the more recent scientific literature strongly supports the conclusion that one set per bodypart is all that it is required to stimulate maximum size and strength increases -- providing of course that the one set is performed at a high level of intensity.

Many personal trainers, taking their lead from professors who if they trained at all, trained under the model of multiple sets (that were popular during the 1970s and early 1980s with athletes), have long advised their clients when working out with weights to perform a minimum of three sets of 8 to 12 repetitions each. And as many of these personal trainers hold impressive looking certificates from "personal trainer associations" their word or position on such matters is considered by many as final. But there is mounting evidence to suggest that these trainers, and even their professors or instructors at these associations, are wrong; that most people (and not merely beginners), receive no additional benefit from engaging in a multiple set program. In fact, a one-set training regimen not only delivers the same or better results, but it saves time, too.

One such study, published in 2003 in the periodical Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise (a journal of the American College of Sports Medicine), studied 42 people whose ages ranged from 20 to 50, and who had been performing one set of a nine-exercise circuit three times a week for at least one year. During the study, half of the participants were asked to increase their sets from one to three for each exercise, which included the standard circuit training exercises such as leg curls, chest presses and biceps curls. When results of the study were analyzed some 13 weeks later, both groups saw similar improvements in their muscle strength, endurance and body composition -- however, the people who trained three times as much did not, as one might expect, get three times the gains. In fact, they didn't even get twice the gains. The results were statistically the same.

According to Chris Hass, an exercise science researcher at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who was one of the authors of the study, in an interview granted to Jacqueline Stenson of MSNBC, "We've been taught to do more and more for so long. But a one-set training regimen is a valid, effective method for weight training for most people." Hass went even further, suggesting that beyond one set, there would appear to be diminishing returns, "The general thought now is that many people are overtraining with three sets," he said.

Wayne Westcott, who is presently the fitness research director of the South Shore YMCA in Quincy, Massachusetts., likewise indicated to Stenson in the same article that his research supported the new findings. "We found that single sets do just as much as repeated sets," he said. "For most people, a single set works fine." According to Wescott, while it would seem that working the muscles longer would produce much greater results, this may not be the case. "The essential stimulus for building strength in muscle tissue is to take the muscle to fatigue one time [with one good set]," he said. "Once you push a muscle to fatigue, it is stimulated to become stronger."

The studies of both Hass and Westcott in support of one-set training are encouraging news indeed for high-intensity training advocates who have long believed in the logical soundness of the high-intensity training protocol but have had to rely largely on anecdotal or testimonial evidence as to its efficacy. In addition, these studies supporting one-set regimens are encouraging news for people who don't have time to do multiple sets in their quest to build bigger and stronger muscles. In Hass' study, for instance,  the group that performed the one-set training regimen completed their program in just 25 minutes, compared with about an hour for the three-set group -- and remember, the three-set group did not get three times the results for all of their extra effort. With each passing decade, the scientific literature in favor of training with one set per bodypart grows. The rational, modern bodybuilder of today doesn't perform sets and exercises that his muscles don't require. He doesn't choose to waste his time in the gym -- and he has the full weight of exercise science behind him for not doing so.

For more information on the scientific literature supporting the one-set protocol, please read The Max Contraction Manual or (coming this December) Max Contraction Training The Scientifically Proven Method For Building Muscle Mass In Minimum Time (Contemporary Books, Chicago).