Splitting up individual workout sets

November 11, 2007 1:19 PM

Is there anything wrong with splitting one particular workout set over a few hours? For instance. If I was looking to do 3 sets of 15, benchpressing. Would there be any downside to doing the first 2 sets at 10 am, and the last set sometime later, like maybe 1-2 pm?

I hope I'm being clear in my question. Basically, do your muscles begin to rebuild so quickly that doing something like this will actually nullify or reduce the positive results from the first set of sets?

Thanks in advance.

posted by aleahey to Health & Fitness (9 answers total)

I would think waiting so long between sets would yield no beneficial physical effects. It would be good to do 50 sit-ups a day, but it wouldn't do any good to do one every half hour for 24 hours.
posted by HotPatatta at 1:37 PM on November 11, 2007

You gain muscle by fatiguing your muscles. During the process of rebuilding from fatigue more muscle is built. Breaking up your sets that much would not cause fatigue, unless you planned to max out on each set (like achieving max reps). And if you are doing max rep sets three times a day, then you are going to over-fatigue your muscles and cause neuromuscular burnout. It's not a great idea.
posted by Anonymous at 1:42 PM on November 11, 2007

Whoops, that should be achieving max weight. But you are doing too many reps to be doing a max-weight workout, so really, you're not getting any benefit from that method at all.
posted by Anonymous at 1:43 PM on November 11, 2007

The reason to do multiple sets is to tire out your muscles more than you would just doing a single set. If you leave a long break between sets, your muscles will have too much time to recover and won't become as tired. Doing sets at different times of the day would possibly be detrimental because your muscles would just be starting to rebuild (which is how you get stronger) when you tire them out again, potentially leading to overtraining.
posted by ssg at 2:38 PM on November 11, 2007

It depends on how you break it up. If you go to failure after 2, then a third later might help, but it also makes injury more likely.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 3:55 PM on November 11, 2007

Schroedinger nailed it.
posted by munchingzombie at 5:14 PM on November 11, 2007

Hmm.. according to my friend who is 70 years old and has been a professional body builder since the 1950s (he even trained Arnie at one point), spacing like that doesn't matter one way or another. You should rest between exercises so as not to pull a muscle. The most important thing is just be consistent and keep doing it every day (or whatever your routine is). Don't miss a day. That is the key - so long as you do it every day for months on end your muscles will respond - the spacing on an intra-day basis is only important for not pulling a muscle - muscle pulls take you out of action. Of course you will find all sorts of ideas on this but I'm just passing on what he told me.

Personally I find the mental discipline of working out every day (hopefully) for *the rest of my life* the hardest part. Making it complicated for myself with fancy routine schedules just makes it all the more likely I won't do it, over the long haul.
posted by stbalbach at 9:09 PM on November 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

If you do the same workout, and lift the same weights, for the same muscle groups every day you'll be building less muscle. You need to fatigue your muscles and let them recover to build anything.
posted by m3thod4 at 11:38 PM on November 11, 2007

m3thod4, that is why it's a good idea to have a trainer who can make changes. I see my trainer every 6 weeks or so as well as make small adjustments in the routine as needed. You still need a routine, written down on paper, that you do every day - that routine will change, but you still need to do a routine every day. Most people don't know how to go about lifting weights honestly and they either hurt themselves lifting too much, make no gains not lifting enough, and/or drop out in the long run.
posted by stbalbach at 9:39 AM on November 12, 2007