To build muscle, perform hard sets that push your muscles to their limit. Do two to three sets per workout, with proper form and a spotter. Use a weight that allows for eight to ten reps before reaching failure. Warm up properly to avoid injury.
To increase muscle size and strength, you need to tax the muscles enough during exercise that they sustain small amounts of damage, which is then repaired by the body, making the muscles bigger and stronger than before. A hard set is a set of repetitions of an exercise that fatigues your muscles and pushes them to the limit of their capacity, often known as the “failure” point. When performing a hard set, it’s important to follow some safety precautions to avoid hurting yourself.
Many exercise enthusiasts who want to build bigger, stronger muscles do two or three hard sets spread out throughout a workout, but not hard enough to cause injury and long enough to facilitate partial recovery. Others may only perform one hard game per workout to train the muscles without the risk of overtraining. Most people who are serious about building muscle generally aim to do multiple hard sets to achieve the maximum amount of fatigue across all muscle fibers.
To do a hard set, first determine the number of reps or reps you want to complete per set. Most women and a few men try to do 12 to 15 reps per set to tone and tighten muscles without bulking up, but for a tough set it’s probably a better idea to aim for a maximum of eight to ten reps, possibly less. Then select the amount of weight you need to lift to reach the failure point of your muscles on the last few repetitions. A regular set can be harder towards the end, but you can, without too much strain, hit your rep goal. During a tough set, you should really be struggling and almost unable to lift the weight at the end.
Be sure to practice proper form for the exercise you’re doing, and use a spotter when lifting weights to avoid serious injury. Spotters can be very important during a tough set, as because you’re trying to push your muscles to failure, you may accidentally drop the weight or be unable to lift the weight yourself. Additionally, proper warm-up before working out, especially when you plan to do a hard workout, can mean the difference between beneficial small muscle tears that cause muscle hypertrophy and a large, painful and debilitating muscle tear or tendon.
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