I cut my sets from 3 minutes to 30 seconds

A few months ago, I tried an experiment. Instead of one all-out set per movement once a week, I split it into three shorter sets and trained everything a bit more frequently. And it’s been the best change I made in years. It’s put me in the best shape of my life, but there is a catch and it caught up with me. So in this video, I’m going to take you through how the protocol’s been working, how I set it up with my clients, and the one thing that will wreck it if you’re not careful. Quick recap if you missed the original video. My whole approach to training for over five years has been to train six movements, train them each at some point once per week for one all-out set that tends to take around two or three minutes. I go as hard as possible from the start, adjust the difficulty as I tyre to keep it doable.
So for that entire couple of minutes, I’m working more or less at my maximum strength capacity. Now, the idea behind these changes is that the work that builds muscle and strength are the reps that are high quality when you’re still at your maximum performance. And once your strength really starts to dip and you’re scaling the movement down to be much easier just to be able to do it, well, there’s a lot of research that suggests that that work is no longer stimulating the sort of muscle growth and strength gain that we want, but it is continuing to pile up disproportionate amounts of fatigue. And so with this new model I’ve been using, rather than just continuing to grind on, once my strength really starts to drop, instead of scaling down to accommodate, I’ve just been calling it there. And so instead of a set lasting three minutes, it might now be more like 30 seconds.
But when you remove two and a half minutes of gruelling, fatiguing work from the set, suddenly you have a whole lot more capacity to do multiple sets and even to train the movement more frequently than once a week. And so this is what that’s looked like. Basically, instead of doing one mega set of horizontal push, having a big rest and then moving on to do a mega set of horizontal pull, et cetera, my training’s been looking much more like one mega set of three movements that involve three different sets of muscle groups and then doing multiple rounds of that. And so I might do a much shorter set of horizontal push, have a short rest to catch my breath, do my horizontal pull, another short rest, and then do my squatting movement. And so in the space of about four to five minutes, I’ve hit three movements and then I can repeat that same cycle as many times as I want until I start to feel like I’m getting diminishing returns.
And so like I used to say when I was doing one set per movement to just do as many reps as you want to until you feel like it’s no longer fun or you’re not getting much out of it anymore or you feel emotional resistance to doing another rep, you can very much do the same thing here with your number of sets. So starting this experiment out full of energy, I tackled five sets because I wanted to find the other extreme. I quickly found that sets four and five were starting to become quite a grind. My body was just exhausted still after doing about three rounds of this. So the sweet spot that I’ve zeroed in on now is three. And so those three movements will be workout A, and then I have workout B where I train my vertical pushing, my vertical pulling, and my knee flexion nautical.
And I catch my three workouts a week, but instead of doing two movements each, I’m now doing these groups of three, which means that every movement gets trained one to two times a week rather than just once. The results from this whole experiment in short have been incredible. Doing three shorter sets rather than one longer one essentially means you can get triple the time practising using your maximum strength. Now we know that that is good for improving maximum strength. Research also suggested that is really good for improving muscle mass. And just intuitively, having three chances every workout to practise your best for that movement gives you so many more opportunities at improvement than just having one set then quickly declines into much lower performance. Each set is less of a mental burden. You get more chances at improving technique. If you’re watching your own videos back, which I highly suggest doing, then you get to iterate multiple times in a session rather than just once a week.
And as I mentioned earlier on doing this, I often find that sets two and three are even stronger than the first. Once my body is primed, warmed up, I’ve practised the movement pattern. I’m actually able to reach higher levels of strength output than in my first set. The other amazing thing is even though we’re doing triple the effective max performance work, I found fatigue overall is so much lower. I end these sessions feeling way fresher than I did before, even though objectively I’ve done a greater amount of harder work. And this means that when I do come back four or five days later to the same movement, I’m just as recovered and ready to go, if not more so than previously seven days later. Again, this is just speaking from my subjective experience. I went more into the research and theory behind this in the original video, but this is just what I’ve found so far from implementing.
As for my physique, I feel quite clearly that this is the peak that it’s ever been at. And I’m aware that with the amount of work I’ve been doing, a lot of this comes from having a pump and inflammation in my muscles. There’s a lot of short-term fluctuation that happens based on the sort of training you’re doing. The important thing long-term is you’re actually getting objectively stronger. However, it’s certainly motivating to see yourself changing physically in the right direction. So that’s been affirming, if nothing else. Now when I’ve talked about this method of training in the past, a lot of the criticism has been that one rep maxes, doubles, triples, really low rep sets are not optimal for building muscle. Interestingly, applying this protocol, I have found that most of my sets fall roughly within the 20 to 40 second range, which as it happens is generally the same time under tension you would get in a five to 10 rep set working with a fixed resistance like a barbell or a machine.
Whether I’m making my reps super hard and grindy or much lighter and doing more of them, I always tend to end up in this 30 second range. So even though it’s somewhat comparing apples and oranges, here when we’re constantly changing the difficulty to adapt to our strength, it’s hard to compare that to working with a fixed resistance like a barbell. It looks like this is naturally falling into the sweet spot of what is generally considered the ideal muscle and strength building range, let’s say five to 10 reps on a barbell. But this is just all speculation. I honestly don’t think you need to overthink intensities and ranges and time of detention too much. There is one principle that makes this work and makes any somewhat reasonable programme work, and that is intent. Whenever you’re making any of these decisions on how long to make your set, how many sets to do, how much to rest before the next one, the key is to just do whatever allows you to truly push hard.
You are always better off doing one set at truly max effort than to do five sets where you’re kind of just fluffing around and never reaching your limits. The thing that will always be true is that gains do not happen without intent. And the reason that my system has worked so incredibly well for me and for so many other people, even if it’s so far from optimal on paper, is that it removes all the barriers to doing that, to actually pushing hard, to finding failure and going for it regardless because we can overintellectualize perfect programming all we want, but it is useless if you don’t actually get in there and grit your teeth and try to be stronger than you were last session. That is all progressive overload comes down to and that is all strength and muscle gains and building a better body come down to.
Doing one set for each of six movements once a week leaves no excuses not to push your absolute hardest on that set. There’s no leaving reps in the tank because there’s nothing to leave them for. So with that said, here is how I’ve been implementing this with my students inside my coaching programme and here’s how I would suggest you do the same if you’re starting out with this stuff. The main challenge in transitioning into this multi-set high frequency sort of training, even though it can be so incredible, is that you need to limit how much you do each set. When you’re doing one set a week, it doesn’t really matter. You can go balls to the wall. You have an entire seven days to recover before you’re hitting that movement again. But when you’re trying to double up, triple up your training of that movement in the session and you’ve only got four or five days before you hit it again, it matters much more that you are managing your fatigue.
That takes restraint and it takes awareness and it’s a lot less simple than the basic model of one set once a week. And that is the reason why I only introduce this to my more advanced students once they have the basics down, which is proper technique of all six movements, training them at max intensity through full range of motion, making consistent progress doing that, scaling up, climbing the progression levels, getting their diet right, getting any excess body fat off, making sure that they’re recovering properly and fueling progress. Once all of those things are in place and they’ve got a good idea of how to manage weekly training volume, get intensity through the roof and listen to their bodies, then we have the space to start thinking about, okay, let’s now reduce our training load. Let’s clear more to performance and cut out everything that’s not our best.
And it’s only once you have done that, it’s only once you have reduced the length of the set massively to the highest performance work that you can then go about adding it in multiple sets, increasing your frequency. And this is also assuming that you have the capacity to think about this a little bit more to maybe make a session slightly longer. And then the AB split of one and a half times a week per movement is only going to work if you can get three sessions in per week. So my advice is if you’re a beginner just starting out with this stuff, it’s certainly incredibly potent and useful, but it only works as well as you have nailed the basis. So if you aren’t already making consistent progress with one set a week, start there and get your technique right, learn how to push hard, find failure, force your negatives.
Most people have never truly worked at their strength limit in their life and that’s why they don’t have the gains that they want. I did this for five years and it’s what got me all my gains. So this stuff works and it makes it so much simpler to make sure you’re getting the essentials right first. If you want help getting all that stuff right in the next couple months, I would highly consider joining us in Ringstrom. You can learn about our entire process, how that works for free by watching the training linked in the description below. And speaking of recovery and managing fatigue, I have never been made more aware of this than recently. Initially when I started this experiment, I started with five sets of everything and so I found that three was the perfect balance. I could go super hard on all of them.
I was recovering well, but it was enough to stimulate or to gain or at least it felt that way. But recently I have not been just doing that in isolation. As I told you about in this recent video, I’ve been doing some experimental work on straight arm positions, practising plant and front labour training by itself and had not factored in the amount that that would cut into my recovery on my core basic exercises. They’ve been a lot more taxing physically than I initially expected, and so I’ve had to cut down sets on them and on this to make everything fit. Now, because the nature of this programme adapts to your body, that’s fine. If I find that I’m feeling cooked after one or two sets, I can call it there. And that’s what it has looked like recently. After getting through my plantar front labour training, because I’ve also been travelling and I’ve had a bunch of other stresses on my body, for whatever set of reasons, my recovery capacity is lower.
I’ve been doing one or two sets of this main work because that’s all I can manage at maximum effort. And remember, you never want to sacrifice intensity and effort. It’s much better to do one hard set than five shit ones. So that’s what I’ve been doing. And so that’s brought up a lot of questions around the trade-offs of that extra work because none of your strength training happens in isolation. Everything is a trade off of energy and recovery. And I’ll talk a lot more about those trade-offs and my honest thoughts in an upcoming video. That’s something to keep in mind. In the world of strength training, there are no free lunches. You need to decide where you’re going to invest your energy. This new protocol has massively helped me eliminate a whole heap of fatigue and open up more energy to put into what I see as the high leverage work.
I’ve heard from a lot of you that it has been working well for you as well. My advanced students inside Ringstrong are certainly crushing it with this approach, so hopefully that is helping. I’ll certainly keep you updated as I continue to tinker, but I found this extremely valuable. If you haven’t already nailed the basics of full range max effort training, getting lean and consistently progressing with one hard set a week, then start there. If you need help, links in the description. Much more good stuff coming soon. Appreciate you all. Speak soon.