Over the last few months I've been thinking A LOT about sets and reps. I realized it's really easy to get caught up in numbers to the point that you lose focus or mask your actual abilities or gains, if any. For example, if I decide I really want to get 20 strict pull-ups I will try to do that to my own detriment and will likely forsake form and technique for the dubious goal of reaching an arbitrary number. Well, it's not ARBITRARY, because being able to do 20 pull-ups means you're strong. Really strong. But it is just a number.
So while I hung out for a long time doing 8 sets of everything every day with the same rep range for each exercise, I eventually decided to quit this and instead to focus on form. It gets old and stressful and takes the fun out of it to always think I need to do this many and that many. I actually got myself to a point where I wondered if maybe sets and reps were completely irrelevant. That is to say, maybe I could get stronger and better without counting anything or always doing more reps or sets.
It's an exciting thought. Of course, it's impossible not to count. Try it. You'll fail. You might be able to distract yourself enough that you don't know the total, but you can't not count. You also can't not think about a polar bear. Try it.
So instead I decided to try to ignore set and rep total goals and instead focus on form and intensity. So instead of saying I have to get 20 dips, I would slow the dips down enough and pause at the top and bottom so that I could only do six. Or four. Or ten. Or whatever. But the focus wasn't the number but the amount of slowing and pausing and form focus that it took to limit me to six or four or ten. And then I decided a useful goal would be to instead of shooting for more reps, I would instead shoot for a more intense form tweaks.
Good stuff, this. Very good. Some days I may have only done three total sets of push-ups, maybe even one. Maybe no more than 10 reps total, whereas before I was always doing over 100 and some times up to 300, yet I still felt "worked out" under the 10 total rep scheme. Then I thought this: could I get a good workout and progress on one rep a day of each exercise? It's a valuable question and a valuable exercise (so to speak) to try and answer it. I encourage you to try. One push-up so slow and so full of pausing that you can only do that one today.
However, as with all things, it also gets old and stressful and you don't want to keep doing it after a while. But you DO want to make progress. So, never say never. It's just not fun to work each day on a single five minute push-up. Useful to try and revisit, but not fun as a permanent thing.
And that's the point, right? You need to progress and therefore you need to change and therefore you never say never and the only thing that's permanent is that you change.
And you know what? Reps and sets are useful because they provide us with thresholds and points of comparison and measuring sticks. So long as you stay honest with your form, that is.
So I went back to this: my idea of an impressive, strong, solid "Round" of the big four would be 20 dips, 10 pull-ups, 25 diamond push-ups and 30 deep squats. I think this is roughly what Hannibal for King does for his "around the worlds". I decided that if I can do at least this at least 3 times a day then I would keep my baseline strength and have something to measure my progress against and have a point of comparison. So that's what I'm doing now.
The next idea would be playing around with getting my minimum daily 20, 10, 25, 30 x 3 and then add skill moves and/or intensity moves to this. I'll keep you posted....
-sr
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