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Most people "working sets" are basically warm ups. A working set has to failure or damn near it (granted squatting to failure is not that smart).
Kinda depends. A set at RPE 7 doesn't feel that hard, the bar speed should be pretty good, it's 4 reps short of failure, 3 reps short of an all out grind. Of course these are approximations. I think a large amount of volume could be RPEs 7-8 and maybe some top sets at 9-10. The warm ups still contribute to the overall volume, they just don't provide as much of an effect, I think. Constantly going to failure usually isn't worth it either from a benefit/fatigue standpoint, at least in terms of strength training. For pure hypertrophy training I'm less sure.
I would recommend TS to up the amount of reps to 8-12 and go pretty much all out in the last one. He will get bigger and stronger. It is also safer than doing heavy triples all the time.
There's nothing particularly better about sets of 8-12 compared to other rep ranges. There's also been a bunch of work coming out now showing that, at equal volumes and proximity to failure, sets of 5 all the way up to 20 reps produce similar hypertrophy responses. It kinda depends on how you structure your training and what your goals are and how you define "strength". If you're interested in increasing your 1RM you need to practice getting under heavy weights at some point. It's really not unsafe to do triples or any other rep range, it's more of a matter of load management and good technique than anything else.
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