Eric Roberts explains why you shouldn't count warm-up sets toward your program's prescribed sets. A working set goes close to failure; warm-ups don't. If your program says three sets, that means three hard sets, not three plus however many light ones you did first.
The majority of people make this workout mistake and I don't want it to be you. You have to understand there is a difference between your working sets versus your warmup sets. And let me explain. Let's say you're doing 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps and let's say your first set you're doing like 25 pounds for 10 reps and it's not really that hard. And the next set you do like 35 pounds for 10 reps and it's like kind of hard but not really. And let's say the last set you grab 45 pounds, you do it for 8 reps and it was a challenging 8 reps. You did not do 3 sets. You did 2 warm-up sets and 1 actual working set, because a working set is where you push yourself very close to failure. So those other 2 sets, they didn't count. You only did 1 set. So when you go to do your workouts and it says do 3 sets, that means 3 sets that are very close to failure. You can still do warm-up sets, just don't count them towards your working sets. I hope it helps.
