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What I gained from 3 months of “top set mentality” workouts
Drew Howerton
February 07, 2024
Good morning! This week, we’re taking a look at some of my personal progress over the past three months, as promised in a previous newsletter edition. I hope you gain something from this and are encouraged to be your own science experiment of one! 🧑‍🔬
If you like hearing more personal stories and progress, let me know. If not, also let me know! All feedback is welcome and valuable :)
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3 Months of “Top Set” Lifting
Gif by muppetwiki on Giphy This little fella’s had quite a week!
Okay, so I didn’t follow it perfectly. But from November through January, I did a pretty good job of following a “top set” style program, like that which is promoted by Dr. Chester Sokolowski. For a deeper refresher than I’m about to provide, you can read the article I wrote about it a few months ago.
The tl;dr is that you work up to one, maybe two “top sets” (i.e. heaviest, all-out-effort sets) per exercise. Then you move on. So volume-wise, this only gets you 2–4ish sets per week for your major lifts. Then maybe do an isolation movement with drop sets to failure.
Overall, the volume for this method isn’t very high. Traditionally, higher volume training is advantageous for hypertrophy (building muscle). But the obviously well-muscled bodybuilder, Dr. Soko, utilizes this approach and is still growing.
A key with this approach is that you need to continue to progress in weights or reps. Ideally by every three weeks or so, you’re able to do more reps with the weight in your top set or you can increase the weight for the same number of reps.
His thesis was that as long as you keep progressing in weight/reps, your muscle will continue growing; you don’t need the volume of 10–20 sets typically prescribed as ideal for hypertrophy.
Of note, I wasn’t exercising in the 2–5 rep range for really anything. That’s the range where you can expect maximum strength gains without much hypertrophy.
Most of my sets were in the 8–15 rep range (the sweet spot for hypertrophy) with some going well over that, as you’ll see in the table of my progress below.
Doing the work
Gif by Openfit on Giphy
Initially, I followed the program pretty well. But as the months went on, it got a little boring, and I started to add back in a bit more volume. But I tried to maintain only 1–2 top sets on my major exercises.
Perhaps a major part of why I was able to progress was the simple fact that I started tracking my workouts very closely again. I got a workout journal from Amazon to record exercises, weights, and repetitions for everything I did.
This meant that when I looked at my book and saw what I did the past couple workouts, I was motivated to beat it. That motivation alone may have been the push I needed to actually progress to the degree I did.
The Results
Enough ado. Below, you’ll see a table with several staple exercises I did throughout these three months.
The first column will be weights/reps I did in the first couple weeks of the program.
The next column will be the weights/reps I lifted in the last couple weeks. It will be written as WeightxReps. If I did a couple top sets, I’ll list them both.
Then, if there’s an easy conversion, I’ll represent improvements in either weight or reps with a % increase in the last column. (I’ve bolded some of my proudest improvements)
*a note: I primarily trained in an apartment gym with limited access to heavier weights. So sometimes I maxed out certain weights and only had the option of increasing repetitions. Occasionally, I visited my commercial gym where I could lift heavier weights.
Exercise | Early weight x reps | Progressed weight x reps | Percentage increase |
|---|---|---|---|
Incline DB Bench Press | 50Ă—17, 50Ă—15 | 50Ă—23, 50Ă—17 65Ă—10, 65Ă—10 | 35% (+6 reps) |
Machine Chest Press | 160Ă—10 | 165Ă—12 | 20%+ (reps) |
Cable chest flies | 25Ă—9 | 30Ă—10 | 20%+ (weight) |
Cable tricep pushdowns | 55Ă—14 | 70Ă—12 | 27% (weight) minus 2 reps |
DB Lateral raises | 20Ă—12, 20Ă—12 | 35Ă—5, 30Ă—9 | hard to quantify due to rep diff. |
Lat pull downs | 215Ă—7, 215Ă—7 | 220Ă—8 | 2% + 1 rep |
Single arm lat pull downs | 50Ă—10, 55Ă—9 | 65Ă—10, 60Ă—10, 55Ă—10 | 30% (weight on first top set) |
DB bicep curls | 30Ă—9 | 40Ă—9, 35Ă—10 | 33% (weight) |
Pull-ups | 4, 3 | 6, 4 | 50% max reps first set |
DB Front Squats | 100Ă—13, 100Ă—13 | 100Ă—23 | 77% (reps) |
Single leg Romanian Deadlifts | 85Ă—11, 95Ă—9 | 100Ă—15, 100Ă—12 | too much math, just look lol |
Bulgarian split squats | 65Ă—8 | 90Ă—9, 90Ă—8 | 38% (weight) + 1 rep |
Leg extensions | 140Ă—12 | 165Ă—14, 165Ă—13 | 18% (weight) + 2 reps |
Leg curls | 160Ă—15, 165Ă—12 | 105Ă—13, 110Ă—11 (maxed out the machine, so these are single leg weights) | ~25-30% (weight) |
As you can see in the table above (and as I am proudly surprised to observe as well), I made some pretty significant gains in terms of what I was able to do! My weights and/or reps went up on virtually everything, and pretty significantly, considering the ~13 week timeframe (or more like 8 weeks for certain movements).
Body composition changes
However, the experiment wasn’t just to see if I could lift more. This was a bodybuilder who argued that this method is great for body composition (i.e. adding muscle). Let’s check my InBody scans to see what I accomplished in this timeframe.
Biometric | 11/19/23 | 01/28/24 | % change |
|---|---|---|---|
Skeletal muscle mass (lbs.) | 104.1 | 106.7 | +2.5% |
Body fat mass (lbs.) | 35.5 | 31.6 | -11% |
While InBody scans can be a bit inaccurate or skewed by various factors, they’re usually pretty consistent within an individual. I have decent data to believe I have at least put on some amount of muscle and lost some amount of fat over the past few months. How much of that is attributable to this specific style of training is to be determined (or not, because I can’t really determine it).
Why? Because I was already training anyway and already in a process of building muscle and losing fat (slow but steady body recomposition). Who’s to say that continuing a higher volume of hypertrophy training like I was doing wouldn’t have yielded equal or better results? It’s impossible to tell.
Similarly, many of our body composition changes stem largely from diet, perhaps more so than exercise. Particularly for fat loss, anyway. So I’m unsure to what degree my dietary behaviors affected my body composition and how much of it is actually attributable to this specific training program.
While I can’t tease all that out, science can! That’s why we have studies, and that’s why they’re so important. They can have control groups and different intervention groups. They can have numerous participants rather than just one. They can control for variables, adjust for factors, and run advanced statistical analyses.
For now, most of the science still suggests 10—20 sets per week per muscle group, pushing to near failure. But lifting is still lifting, and this method isn’t too far off from that!
In conclusion, I did find this style of training beneficial to my muscular endurance, muscular strength (at higher rep ranges), and body composition, all to some extent. How much, I can’t say. But I can pretty confidently say the effects were at least positive.
Will I keep doing it? Not necessarily. I’ve learned some principles to incorporate into my training going forward—some to use periodically and some woven into everyday practice. But I tend to do better with a little more variety, and this fairly restrictive, structured program got a bit boring for me, to be honest. And some (most) days, I simply didn’t want to aim for a set of 20+ reps of dumbbell front squats. That stuff’s brutal.
I would be curious to see how this plays out with heavier weights at lower rep ranges (2–8), so I may test this method in that way at a gym with access to more weights.
It’s been a fun experience! What’s next for me? Some higher volume hypertrophy training, then entering a cut and increasing my cardio and running volume as I prepare for some major races ahead 👀
âś… Take Action
Every newsletter's Take Action section will invite you to take small steps to improve your health. Recognizing that we all have different capabilities, I'll offer three different levels of action you can choose to take.
Level 1: Curious to try something new, whether in your training, diet, or otherwise? Give it a try for a month or two and objectively track progress and results!
Level 2: Have you hit a plateau? Find another proven method to try and vary up your training, and give it a full 8-12 weeks.
Level 3: Try the top set method for a few months! See how far you can push those GAINZ đź’Ş
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Keep moving,
Drew
The content in Move to Improve is meant to be informative in nature, but it should not be taken as medical advice. It is always a good idea to consult with a trusted health professional before making any major lifestyle changes that could have a significant impact on your health. This is not a medical resource, and any opinions and articles are not intended for use as diagnosis, prevention, and/or treatment of health problems. They are not substitutes for consulting a qualified medical professional. Please think critically and take what I say with a grain of salt (aka don’t sue me).