Aside from the fact that the tradeoff with doing 1 set is actually much less performance improvement long-term, the main problem with this idea is that it just doesn't take all that much time to bust out 3 sets vs 1 set of something, at least for the more critical, whole body exercises (squat, deadlift, bench, chin, row, clean...)
Factoring in generalized warmup, cool-down, travel to the gym, getting changed in and out of exercise clothes, showering, etc - you're talking about a 10-15 extra minutes of training in order achieve substantially greater gains.
http://www.nsca-lift.org/HotTopic/download/Single%20vs%20Mul...
http://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/Fulltext/2009/03000/Progre...
Aside from the fact that the tradeoff with doing 1 set is actually much less performance improvement long-term, the main problem with this idea is that it just doesn't take all that much time to bust out 3 sets vs 1 set of something, at least for the more critical, whole body exercises (squat, deadlift, bench, chin, row, clean...)
Factoring in generalized warmup, cool-down, travel to the gym, getting changed in and out of exercise clothes, showering, etc - you're talking about a 10-15 extra minutes of training in order achieve substantially greater gains.