Squats , weight or volume?

silverharp

I started doing squats this summer and on the basis that they are a great compound exercise I decided about 6 or 7 weeks ago to make it the backbone of my leg work in the gym so about twice a week I do 3 sets of 10 at a low weight 7 sets of 5 at my current high weight and 3 sets of 10 at a weight in between the other 2. Each session so far I have been able to add a weight to the "heavy" sets and upping the other sets as well and its going well, if I add up all the reps and multiply by kg Im up about 30% in the month.

So I guess the question is, should I be maximising the weight of the middle sets and treat the other sets as warm up and cool down or is it "all good" and as long as I am adding more volume each session then its good progress?
And secondly as I am currently doing 95 squats in a session is there any benefit to adding any more sets at the end to increase the overall volume or is there diminishing returns afte x number of reps per session?


My overall fitness goal is to lose that last stubburn 10kg (which I know is mostly diet related)

tastyt

silverharp wrote: »

I started doing squats this summer and on the basis that they are a great compound exercise I decided about 6 or 7 weeks ago to make it the backbone of my leg work in the gym so about twice a week I do 3 sets of 10 at a low weight 7 sets of 5 at my current high weight and 3 sets of 10 at a weight in between the other 2. Each session so far I have been able to add a weight to the "heavy" sets and upping the other sets as well and its going well, if I add up all the reps and multiply by kg Im up about 30% in the month.

So I guess the question is, should I be maximising the weight of the middle sets and treat the other sets as warm up and cool down or is it "all good" and as long as I am adding more volume each session then its good progress?
And secondly as I am currently doing 95 squats in a session is there any benefit to adding any more sets at the end to increase the overall volume or is there diminishing returns afte x number of reps per session?


My overall fitness goal is to lose that last stubburn 10kg (which I know is mostly diet related)

Your doing way too many sets. After warm up sets concentrate on heavy and drops the reps. As you said, the last 10 kg is gonna be lost in the kitchen

Inspector Coptoor

You could have two squat based days

One for strength, ie 5 sets of 5 reps going pretty heavy, starting at 70% of 1rm and increasing by 2.5% in a linearly progressive way

And a second day where you could do 4-8 sets for volume in the 50-70% range

Lee_Torre

Inspector Coptoor wrote: »

You could have two squat based days

One for strength, ie 5 sets of 5 reps going pretty heavy, starting at 70% of 1rm and increasing by 2.5% in a linearly progressive way

And a second day where you could do 4-8 sets for volume in the 50-70% range

I agree with this, if you are doing a lot of squat workouts anyway, why not get the best of both worlds. Plus it all depends on your goals, if it's strictly hypertrophy I'd do more medium weight and slightly less weight set with high volume.