Choosing the right number of sets per muscle group to achieve maximum muscle growth is a very individual thing. What’s right for you may not be best for me, and it changes over time.
To illustrate, Steve Reeves, an iconic pre-golden era bodybuilder, is well known for doing 9 sets per body part 3 times a week, totalling 27 sets a week! But he didn’t start there, nor does he recommend it for beginners.
In a beginner workout, he suggests only 2 sets per body part each training session totalling 6 sets a week. He had a progression when it came to sets. So how do we go from 2 sets to 27? And does current research even support 27 sets per body part?
More importantly, how do we apply this to ourselves, so we’re training with the optimum amount of sets? In this video, we’re going to answer all these questions. Including a little-known study that establishes how many sets we should add based on our training history to achieve maximum new muscle growth.
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For an overview, let's look at a systematic review on training volume published this year in February. It looked at 7 studies where the participants had at least one year of training experience.
They were broken into one of three groups, under 12 weekly sets, 12 to 20, and over 20. These were hard sets with the test subjects training to failure in all the studies except for one where they trained within 2 repetitions from failure.
The cool thing about this review is it’s the first time there’s been enough information to look at set ranges over 12.
A previous meta-analysis released in 2016 looked at 3 lower set groups, with one being under 5 sets a week, another 5 to 9 and finally 10 or more sets.
This was a more inclusive analysis as it had studies with both new and experienced lifters. It found a dose-response to the number of sets done. Meaning the more sets you do per week, the more muscle growth you’ll experience, at least up to 10 sets.
The new research found an upper limit where we can no longer build muscle faster by adding more sets. Stating the limit was between 12 to 20 sets. Kind of a big range, but this is where individualizing the number of sets comes in.
Most of us have full-time jobs, and our training is done on top of this, leaving us with much less time for recovery.
The bottom line is the maximum amount of volume you can do and fully recover from is what will give you the most muscle growth.
If we’re not completely recovering from our current level of training, it makes no sense to increase our training volume by adding another set. We may need to look at other factors, such as sleep and nutrition.
Now, if we feel fresh and ready for our next workout, then we need to look at the intensity of our training. Are we training close to failure on all are working sets? If not, we should increase the intensity first.
To determine how much volume to add, we’ll look at individualizing how many sets a person is currently doing.
They did this by having the participants train one leg with 22 sets a week and the other with 20% more training volume than they previously had been doing. They did leg presses and extensions.
Half the test subjects were doing between 30 to 120% more volume on the 22-set leg, and yet they had greater muscle growth on the leg than that was only training with 20% more work, indicating that a rapid increase in training volume doesn’t bring about a rapid increase in muscle growth.
The number of sets we should be doing in our programs should be increased gradually, just like the amount of weight or the number of reps we’re doing.
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