how many reps and sets..........

My husband and I tend to do like 10 reps (sometimes 15 20.. depends on the weight/work out) and 4 sets.

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I should add that w/ every set we try to go up some weight.. and attempt to go for 10

Bump for info.

This won't be a popular opinion because it doesn't follow one of the many popular plans but....

Number of reps is irrelevant. Your muscles can't count. They just know if they are being overloaded. Overloading causes growth / increase in strength. Also, a lot of it has to do with how you do the reps. I strongly prefer eccentric reps for almost everything that isn't a 3 rep max set, but I'm really comfortable doing negatives and a lot of folks aren't. The short answer here is that you do reps to contractile failure, meaning until you can't do another one. That's how you overload. If you set out to do 10 reps and you do all 10 reps you just wasted your time. You have to think of it as a conversation with your body. Doing 10 reps and stopping is telling your body "I'm going to be asking you to do things that you can already do", and as such your body won't change much. Doing however many reps it takes to get to failure at that weight is telling your body "I'm going to ask you to do things you cannot presently do", and as a result your body changes ( adding muscle ) to adapt to your new demands. This is the essence of weight training.

Two thoughts to keep in mind as you think about the various systems out there. Most of them spring from a study done a few decades ago ( University of Minnesota maybe? University of Wisconsin? ) that determined that the optimal scenario for muscle growth was to keep the muscle under load for 40 to 70 seconds. That's where the 10 rep thing comes from. The idea was that you did your reps with a cadence of 2 seconds up, 2 seconds down. Four seconds per rep, 10 reps, 40 seconds. There have since been a number of people voicing differing opinions, but not one clinical study that refutes this idea. However, if you're doing those 10 reps quickly and not with the 2x2 cadence, you're not getting the 40 seconds. That's why I say if you don't go to contractile failure you're wasting your time.

The conventional wisdom has always been 3 to 5 sets regardless. This was disputed a bit back in the late 80s / early 90s by Dr. Michael Yessis who claimed that most people overworked their biceps and triceps and thus stunted their growth. He believed that the absolute best way to train arms was with a tape measure. You measure cold and then you measure after each set. Once you hit a pump of 1 or 1.5 inches you stop. Everything after that was just doing damage to the very systems you want to help you grow. There was a recent study that attempted to verify the 3 to 5 set principle and what it found instead was pretty surprising. It turns out that for upper body there is absolutely no increase in mass or strength gains after the first set to failure. You're not hurting yourself doing more than one set to failure, but your not helping yourself either. Legs, however, required 2 to 4 sets to maximize gains. This would seem to make sense insofar as your legs are under pretty much constant load and therefore would require more to become overloaded.

Like I said, devotees of various systems will tell you this is all crazy, but that's the view from someone who's been active off and on in the body building / strength training lifestyle in 4 different decades.

If you're a beginning lifter, check out either Starting Strength, or Stronglifts. In my opinion Starting Strength has a lot more info, and is the better of the two, but Stronglifts is totally free.

If you're just looking for a new routine: http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/bbmaintrain.htm

Alternatively consider 5/3/1 by Jim Wendler.

^^^ What he said. All worth checking out.