I've been working out for the past 2 months (purely strength, not endurance. Already have enough for my needs gotten through biking) and I'll definitely keep going through the winter unless something unexpected stops me. I've been wanting to get fit forever (I've always been skinny).
The chart looks similar to what I was told, except I was told the "Muscle mass" column was "Muscle strength" and the "Strength" and "Power" columns were both combined under a "Muscle size".
In essence: A set should always keep going until the point where you simply cannot do a single repetition with the weight again: You reach your "Repetition Maximum" or Repmax. This can be achieved in two ways: Either you do the set with a heavy weight, thereby achieving a low number of repetitions, or you can use a light weight and then do more repetitions. In both conditions you
must train until you cannot lift the thing one more time, but the muscle you achieve through the different methods (heavy and short vs. light and long) have different characteristics: Heavy but short gives you big muscles with little comperative endurance while light and long gives comparatively small muscles but very endurant. This is why olympic weight lifters are huge while marathonners are skinny. They're both very strong, just in different aspects.
If anyone's interested, here's the workout I do:
5 minutes of rowing for warmup
3x10 repmax of deadlift
3x10 repmax of leg press
3x10 of breast press
3x10 of vertical row
3x10 of pulldown (laterals)
3x10 of horizontal row
3x10-15 situps on one of those big bouncy balls
I do this 3 times a week on Saturday, Monday and Wednesday.
The diet is actually very important as well if you want to get quick results. The way I look at it is like this: Training does not directly give you bigger muscles, however it releases a lot of hormones and other funny chemicals that promotes protein storage in the muscles. These chemicals are on a raging fury about 30 minutes after you've worked out, then they tone down and return to normal levels after about 48 hours. This is why it's important to spread your workouts evenly (3 times 1 hour workouts spread out is better than a single 3 hour workout). This is also why you have all those commercial protein bars and powders: If you ingest a protein rich meal in that 30 minute window after you've worked out, it all goes straight to the muscle. If you want to do this trick as a sort of "homebrew" without shelling out loads of cash for
"Specialised fitness TO THE MAX!!!!!" stuff, just drink a bunch of milk after the workout. Something along the lines of half a liter should do.
And finally, if you're going to do free weight exercises make sure to have someone show them to you, or have a very strict diagram to adhere to. The different exercises are often very strict in order to gain maximum effeciency, and you'll also be wanting someone to show you the ropes so that you end up doing an even workout instead of just focusing on a single muscle. Big biceps are cool and all, but if you have absolutely no shoulders, chest or triceps, they just look and feel awkward.
My 2 cents
EDIT:
Some of the most important information to know.
This was very interesting. Some of the things I already knew (Proper free-weight training beats machines any day, doing a bad compositioned workout with bad exercises leads to bad results), but I'll definitely be looking into those 4 "prevent-injury" routines as well as finding some of those books.