Ok, so I've been hearing a lot lately about making workouts shorter and going till failure on everything and wanted to see what everyone else had to say about it. I'm use to always training anywhere from 12-20 sets per body part once a week, depending on the body part. Doing 3-6 exercises with 4 sets an exercise, usually going to failure on the last set or 2. From what I've read and heard this is total over kill. I've always enjoyed these kind of workouts and seemed to get decent results and pumps with it. A friend of mine from work is getting into being a personal trainer and they have him on a new theory and he says so far he has made good gains and progress. He says instead of doing lots of sets per exercise, just focus everything on 1 set per exercise and go to complete total failure with perfect form with a weight you can only do 6-12 reps of, and do total of 6-9 sets per muscle.

I tried this today with a back workout and I must say my back got a great pump and is already pretty sore. my workout looked a little something like this

Barbell rows:1 set to warm up, then 2 working sets
Lat pulldowns: 2 sets
seated rows: 2 sets
DB rows: 1 set
close grip pulldowns: 2 sets

After that I did a few other exercises but I was already to the point where I couldn't do anything anymore. I was also using drops sets the whole workout and on a few of the lifts when I would decrease the weight I sometimes couldn't even do as many reps as the first because I went to failure the first exercise. Just wanted to get some feed back before I possibly started a new routine.