how do you fit in 10 - 20 sets for bulking?

J

jonny100

0
I heard that for bulking it is best to do 10 - 20 sets of each exercise with the reps being around 8-10. But if your workouts are not supposed to exceed 45 min - 1 hour then how can you fit in 10 - 20 sets of roughly 5 exercises?
Do you just have to go very fast, or only do one or 2 exercises per workout?
 
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I think to do that kind of training you'll need to like do one muscle group a day. Like chest on mondays, back on tuesdays, shoulders on wednesdays, arms on thursdays, legs on fridays, and core on saturdays.
 
Well Fil keeps saying that 10 - 20 reps are what you should be doing for bulking. And I just thought that that would take a long time and would limit you to a few exercises.
 
I get so confused...there's so much information about, it seems like whenever someone says something, you can almost always find someone else saying the exact opposite.

Personally i do a push/pull/rest system and i'll do once through with 12 reps per set, then next time up the weight and do 8, always so reaching failure on the last few reps of the last set. I do 3 sets of these reps per exercise and try to do 3 exercises per muscle.

I also pick one muscle toreally kill each workout, usually triceps on push and biceps on pull and i'll do about 20 sets right at the end of the workout on this muscle, and finish with some statics on it.

This has seemed to work so far for me with bulking, but who knows?
 
Here's the section from the National Strength and Conditioning Association's training manual:

Training for Muscle Size. A hypertrophy, or bodybuilding, trianing program involves using lighter loads, which allows the athlete to perform more repetitions than is typical of a strength training program, but heavy enough to elicit concentric or eccentric contraction failure (inability of the muscle to shorten or lengthen under control) within 6 to 12 repetitions. The rest period is of short to moderate duration, since it is important to begin the next set of exercise before full recovery has been achieved. Also, it is not unusual for the athlete to perform 12 to 20 (or more) successive sets that focus on one muscle group during a single training session. This higher overall training volume coupled with a moderate relative intensity (expressed as a percent of 1RM), although lower than for strength training, appears to be optimal to increas muscle girth...
Click to expand...
It goes on for a while like that, but this is the most relevant part to this discussion. So, more sets, lower intensity, nearly no rest between sets. Yes, it takes a long time, but ideally you're doing the sets quickly, and not taking much time between them.

Scientifically (and practically, I'm sure) this is the best way to build muscle mass. Of course, doing any kind of weightlifting is going to give you more mass. It's more a question of HOW FAST is it going to happen.

Also note that training like this won't build up strength as quickly as it will size. But then, that's the point of bulking, yes?
 
so really it doesn't matter how long it takes just as long as you go through the 20 or so sets?

Is the idea to drop the weight as you go along so that you can do more reps? Because once I get through about 4 sets my reps start to decrease.

And if I'm doing so many sets, should I stick to one or two exercises each workout, that each target a different muscle group? (eg. one for biceps, one for chest).
Would it be ok to switch to different exercises after every full cycle of workouts so that the muscles are hit in a variety of ways?

And should I follow a push/pull system?
 
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