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What to do between sets

What do you do with your time between sets?

Here’s what I usually see: people sitting on a piece of equipment between sets, zoning out, or chatting with people. The sitting around part can be a pain because in a crowded gym, chances are good someone else would like to be using the bench or machine you’re perched on.

Now I’m going to sound like an old crank. But when I first started working out in gyms, in the early 1980s, it was common gym etiquette to allow others to “work in” with you. The person using the bench, machine, whatever, might ask someone standing nearby, “Did you want to work in?” And nobody took offense if you approached someone and asked whether you could work in. That’s a phrase I rarely hear these days.

The other problem with sitting around, as I see it, is that you’re losing focus and losing an opportunity to keep your heart rate up.

What I like to do upon finishing a set: immediately move to another exercise for the same or a different bodypart or immediately begin a few laps (40 seconds each) around the indoor track. I find that staying in motion keeps my energy up, and if I’m walking, I start thinking about the next set and what I hope to accomplish with it.

If I just sit and wait, I can almost feel my energy level draining.

And although I don’t want to be antisocial in the gym, there’s only so much time I’ll devote to chatting with people unless the workout is over. Talking about something other than what I’m doing at the moment also causes me to lose focus and energy.

So what do you do between sets? And are you happy with the energy level of your workout?

Posted on July 21st, 2005 under fitness. Tags: energy, energy level, energy level draining, favorite. Comments: 4

How many sets?

I haven’t felt very talkative (should that be blogative?) lately. My apologies.

Workouts are going well, bodyfat is going down, and I feel generally terrific. I keep getting comments about how much “energy” I have–from various sources. So I must be doing something energetic-looking. Fidgeting? Wiggling? Jumping up and down?

The enhanced energy level is making me want to add–though cautiously, very cautiously–more exercise. I’m already occasionally adding an additional day of cardio (the intense kind–not the routine 30 minutes’ walk through the neighborhood with dogs at 5 a.m.), and I’m thinking of adding a fourth weight workout per week. If I do, the number of sets will be ridiculously low: maybe eight to 10. On a typical weights day I’m currently doing only 12 to 14 sets. Not many by volume-training standards.

In the past I’ve slipped into overtraining when I went great guns, but I hope now I’m old enough to figure out what’s happening if I do get excessive.

I’m intrigued by Ian King’s book Get Buffed (yes, silly title but a boatload of information) and his take on the number of sets one should perform. There’s no easy answer, but many factors influence the decision, e.g., one’s age, how active or sedentary one’s job is, how much life stress one has, and how much rest one is getting.

Well, this one has a sedentary desk job, but she has a fair amount of life stress, is no longer a spring chicken, and doesn’t always get as much sleep as she wants. I can do 20+ sets per workout, but within a week or two, my mood is crap and my motivation is gone. When I do a dozen sets per workout, I improve or maintain my strength levels and am eager to get to the gym. That seems to be the magic number for me at this stage of life, with a full-time job, commitments to four separate singing groups, half a dozen dogs, and so on.

The moral of the story is, when you’re losing interest in the gym and think you ought to be doing more, you might need to take a weeklong layoff, then come back to the gym and start doing less.

Posted on March 11th, 2005 under fitness. Tags: energy, energy level, favorite, Ian King. Comments: 3