Q: Hey Mike. I excersise 3 times a week, 50 mins a session. I would like to know if its better to do increasing wieghts (i.e. sets of 8kg, 10kg, 12kg 14kg) or to do all of the sets at maximum weight. And how many sets per excercise should i do.
Thanx for your time

A: I would recommend doing top or near top weight for most or even all sets. In your example, if you can do 14kgs for, say, 8 reps, then 8kgs is way too little and just becomes a warm-up set. Maybe do 12kgs for 10-12 reps for 1-2 sets and then do 14kgs for 6-8 reps for 1-2 sets.

As to your second question, the number of sets per exercise is going to be determined by how much time you spend on your whole program. I strongly recommend whole-body training -- that means you have 4-5 major muscle groups: legs, back, chest, shoulders, arms (legs and back really deserve more time than shoulders or arms, but lets count them equally for simplicty's sake in this example). In your case you spend 150 minutes per week weight training, so that works out to roughly 30 minutes per muscle group. with roughly 3 minutes per set that allows you to do 10 sets per muscle group per week. Then you can split those 10 sets into 3 exercises of 3-4 sets or 4 exercises of 2-3 sets.