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Season′s Greetings Guys

After a lot of thinking and deliberation about switching routines, possibly going back to the Ideal routine after a couple years on the athlete′s routine, I have decided to reduce volume further by doing just one set per workout. Being close to my genetic potential, though not quite there yet, I figured this was the next logical step in my bodybuilding career. I was further convinced of this after reading some of Hit4Life′s old posts on this forum, who eventually found himself doing just one set per workout. I started my new routine today, and I was up 15 pounds on the Hammer Strength pulldowns. After experiencing good strength gains lately, and witnessing an accompanying muscle mass increase, I realized strength increases are the key, at least for me. So hopefully dropping to one set will provide even greater strength increases until I have hit my full genetic potential. I will probably continue working out once every two weeks, gradually reducing to about three weeks when it warrants.

I will be doing the following routine: dips/incline press, rest, pulldowns, rest, leg press, throwing in an occasional partial deadlift. Just thought I′d give an update on my current training.

Hammer

Sounds like it will be an interesting experiment.

Hello hammer

Just out of curiosity what sort of strength/weight gains have you had since you have been doing the athletes routine.

Jonson

What do you mean by doing just one set per workout. Exactly what would you do? Are there any warm up sets?

Are you doing Pre-Exhaust?

Red Dog

I do a brief warm-up before my actual set, a couple of easy reps at a very light weight, a rep or so at a moderate weight then one rep at or near the weight I use for my working set. I′m not doing any pre-exhaust now, though I might throw a pre-exhaust set of flyes/incline press into my routine every once in a while for variety. I plan to do one set of dips, following 2 weeks later by a set of pulldowns, then leg press for my next workout.

Jonson-I put on 5-10 pounds of muscle on the athletes routine, at an already advanced state. I went from doing dips with 25 pounds on my weight belt to 75 pounds, and that′s with my weight increasing as well. My leg press also went up from 520-750 pounds while on the athletes routine.

Right now I am recovering from my pulldowns on Saturday and am nowhere near ready to go to the gym again. This one-set routine just feels right for me at this point; maybe it′s not for everybody, but I was having trouble recovering from two sets so it seems like a natural progression.

Hammer