How Many Sets Should You Do?

Having said that, your goal can change things significantly. Lifting close to your 1-rep-max to build strength doesn't require more than 10 to 12 sets a week. And if your purpose is to start growing stubborn muscles, then pushing volume upwards of 20 can actually be a good idea.

Below we explain what you may find at each range:

Current guidelines put the floor for growth at around 10 sets a week per muscle, and most programs start somewhere between 8 and 12. The ceiling is actually not set. Across everything studied so far, more sets kept buying a little more growth, with no clear point where it stops.

The edge to be aware of: past 25 sets there aren't many studies to cite, and the ones that exist point to increasingly diminishing returns. Your growth may not be capped as you do more sets, but the difference between 8 and 30 is minimal.

A study tested low vs. high volume. One group trained 9 hard sets a week per muscle. The other did 36 sets.

The results were surprising: both groups grew the same.

Even with 4x the volume, the 36-set group didn't grow an inch bigger than the 9-set group. Hold it loosely though. The study is still working through review, and it measured muscle with calipers and tape rather than a scanner, which is a blunt enough tool to make a tie easier to find.

This does not mean doing 9 sets is enough or that 36 sets is too much. But it does mean that past a certain point you will really not grow that much more. And for most people, that often means make sure you do enough.

Because there are many factors to consider. And more importantly, growth happens across a wider range than most people realize.

You can see effective volume as a flattening curve. It starts very steep up to around 10 sets, then it starts to flatten, until it goes past 20 sets where the gains still appear but at a way less interesting rate.

What this means is simple: for most people, the most efficient growth stimulus will happen between 6 and 14 sets. You can push above that without problems, but once you go to around 25 sets, then you're collecting less growth and more exhaustion.

This means something simple: most of the old volume advice is wrong. No, you don't need to go over 20 sets to build muscle. You don't even need to go past 10 sets.

What happens is that not every set is the same. People's ability to crank intensity in the first 8 to 12 sets in a single session is a lot higher than the intensity at 12 to 20 sets once fatigue sets in.

This changes with frequency, as you can definitely train the muscle three times a week with 10 sets each (total 30 sets).

Another important factor comes up: experience. Lifters who know what they're doing can produce a lot more effective stimulus with smaller volume, even if their growth rate is smaller.

So in short: there's no real truth around volume and you can definitely crank 30 sets and get tons of growth or stay within 12 sets and get similar results. But if you go higher, that usually means you'll have to spend way more time at the gym, exert way more effort in general, and perform way more reps to get there.

When the target muscle is hit directly, that counts as a set (1 set). When the target muscle is hit indirectly, that counts as half a set (0.5 set).

This is called fractional volume. And counting assisting work at half a set predicted growth better than counting every set the same.

If you track your upper body volume for a single workout using this method, your logs will look like this:

Yes, but not 100%. Volume is a bit hard to quantify completely, so fractional volume just makes it the most accurate you can get, not perfect.

Here's why it's good. Take a chest and arm day: 4 sets of overhead extension, 4 sets of flat bench press, and 4 sets of incline dumbbell press.

However, fractional volume is still not perfect science, so it is not free of caveats.

Not all sets are equal. Exercises put different amounts of stimulus on the assisting muscles. A regular bench press counts as half a set for your triceps. A narrow-grip bench press does considerably more for them while still being a chest exercise, so call it 0.7 if you had to put a number on it. Nobody has actually measured that number.

Accuracy relies on execution. A wide-stance squat and a close-stance, heel-elevated squat do not load your quads the same. One is a full set. The other is closer to 0.7, with more of the work going to your glutes.

It is more work. Counting this way by hand is genuinely harder. APEX does it automatically from the workouts you log.

Fractional sets are one of the most used methods in exercise science. That makes them one of the most reliable ways to measure what your workouts actually did.

Reality is, for most people it depends on their goals and availability. If you want to grow a specific part of your body that seems to be lagging, then you may want to push volume up. But that depends on actually being able to get to the gym more often, so you don't end up doing junk volume.

In a single session, here's how you can tell you've done enough.

If you ignore these signs, you're heading into what's called junk volume: doing more than you need, where the extra sets cost you more in fatigue and time than they give back.

When you've already done enough direct and indirect work on a muscle, but you decide to keep going.

Say you've already hit 16 to 20 sets for a muscle in a week. You decide to try yet another exercise to go for “the pump”, for the extra boost. But reality is, at that point you've already exhausted most of the clean stimulus.

What's left is smaller returns for your effort and accumulating fatigue.

Two studies actually tested it. One found that 9, 18 and 27 weekly sets came out almost the same. A second found that once you've reached your set minimum, adding either 30% or 60% on top of that volume didn't help at all.

Now, these are only two studies and the ways they got to the same volume were different. But that gives you a general perspective of the truth: most extra sets past a certain point don't really help.

That's what junk volume means. Going beyond your effective range unnecessarily.

The recommendation is that you get “close to failure”. That often means 1 to 3 reps from the moment your target muscle can't do a single more rep.

This is the standard for hypertrophy, at least. For strength work you don't really need to approach failure.

Failure is optional. It is encouraged because it forces you to try harder. But in reality failure is not necessary as long as you're 1 to 3 reps away. The problem is that getting to that place is hard enough and usually indistinguishable from actual failure.

Getting “close to failure” is mostly useful as a heuristic for people who know what they're doing. Advanced and intermediate lifters who can identify what actual, proper, safe failure means. And can stop a set just before that happens.

For most people, especially beginners, close to failure can be a very abstract command.

At the end of the day, treat failure with respect if you're not sure how to perform an exercise properly, so you can avoid getting hurt. Otherwise, just go head-first into it.

As a general rule: if the target muscle isn't trembling and your last rep didn't slow right down, you can probably do at least one more rep. That's how hard you should go.

Depends on many factors, but the general recommendation points at spreading your total weekly volume per muscle over at least 2 sessions, if your availability allows.

This mostly happens because muscles have sort of a volume ceiling per day. That's usually capped at around 11 hard sets, from work that is still going through review, so hold it as a soft edge rather than a rule.

Sure, that means anywhere from 8 to 12 sets is still worthwhile. But past a certain point, probably around the upper area, more sets in a day won't cause more growth and may in fact cause significantly more exhaustion.

How many sets per workout isn't a reliable way to go about it. But spreading it too much won't really help you that much either.

What frequency buys is set quality. That is, you will put way more effort and perform every rep with more intensity if you learn how to spread the volume well enough. Training 3 times a week, doing 7 sets each session (21 sets in total), is indistinguishable from training 2 times a week, 10 sets each session (20 sets in total).

For most people, aiming for two times a week per muscle, spreading volume within 8 to 12 sets per day, trying to reach around 20 sets in total is the way to go.

The minimum recommended by the evidence is 4 sets a week per muscle. That's what you can usually find as the Minimum Effective Volume (MEV). But that's a general population floor. The real floor can vary depending on experience and goals.

Minimum, however, is not what most people should strive for. The best minimum range is usually from 5 to 12 sets per week. That's where the evidence shows the highest return per set without much fatigue cost.

Now, if your point is to maximize your growth, then you should forget about minimum effective volume and aim straight for more than 10 sets, up to 20 sets per week. You don't have to go that far, but it's usually where the rest of the high-ROI effort lives.

First up, make sure you meet the minimum, 4 sets per muscle, and that you have a particular reason to increase sets, like wanting to emphasise a muscle to boost its growth.

If that's the case, then you can proceed to see if it applies.

If you meet all these checks, then you're free to increase sets. Just make sure they go alongside a wider, well-designed workout plan. You may not want to add sets to an exercise where you'd be better off adding volume in other parts of your plan.

And make sure you don't go past the effective limit, around 20 sets. Unless you have a very specific reason, 10 to 20 sets should be your standard.

Ultimately what matters is that each set counts. That means putting in enough effort to make the muscle actually work and create the tension it needs to grow.

But if we were going to put a number on how many sets to do per muscle every week, we'd recommend 10 to 20 sets. That's the standard, for most people.

If you're experienced and know how to get the most out of each rep, feel free to do less than that. Or if you have a lagging muscle you want to push through to make it grow, feel free to go past the range.

Either way, whether you're struggling to land on a number, don't know how to start progressing, or just don't want to think about any of this, use APEX.