Hypertrophy Training Volume: How Many Sets to Build Muscle? (2024)

If you’re following a good hypertrophy training program, you should be able to maximize your rate of muscle growth with 9–22 sets per muscle per week. But that depends on which exercises you choose, what muscles you’re training, and how hard you’re training them.

If you’re training for other goals—strength, power, fitness, or endurance—you’ll stimulate less muscle growth per set, so you’ll need more sets to maximize muscle growth. However, you might also inflict more stress per set, meaning you can’t recover from as many.

So, we’ll start by reviewing the best type of training volume for building muscle. Then, we can talk about how many sets it takes to maximize your rate of muscle growth.

What is Training Volume?

There are two popular definitions of training volume. Both of these definitions are correct. Both can be useful, too.

• Training Volume = pounds lifted per movement pattern per week: number of sets × number of reps × weight lifted. For example, if you bench press 225 pounds for 10 sets of 5 reps, your weekly bench press volume is 11,250 pounds. Some people call this “tonnage.”
• Training volume = number of hard sets per muscle group per week. So, if you do 5 challenging sets of bench presses on Monday and Friday, your chest volume is 10 sets per week.

The first definition is better if you’re trying to improve how much work you can handle per week (work capacity). It can also be useful when following low-rep strength training routines that don’t stimulate as much growth per set. It’s less useful when you’re following a hypertrophy training routine.

When you’re training to build muscle, you don’t need to know how much work you’re doing, just how much muscle growth you’re stimulating. In a hypertrophy training program, every set is designed to stimulate muscle growth, so all you need to do is count them. (I think this idea comes from Nathan Jones. I heard about it from Greg Nuckols.)

Training volume is best defined as the number of challenging sets you do per muscle per week. If you do 5 sets of bench presses on Monday, 5 sets of push-ups on Wednesday, and 5 sets of dips on Friday, that’s 15 sets for your chest. Thus, your chest volume is 15 sets per week.

The Ideal KIND of Training Volume

Different styles of training stimulate different amounts of muscle growth, so we need to cover the ideal kind of volume before the ideal amount of volume.

For example, let’s say you’re trying to build bigger biceps, so you decide to do 12 sets for your biceps every week. And let’s say you choose an exercise like the barbell row, do 3 reps per set, and stop 3 reps shy of failure. That isn’t a good way to stimulate your biceps, so those 12 sets won’t get you very far.

Now let’s imagine you swap the rows for biceps curls, do 10 reps per set, and take those sets within a rep of failure. Now you’re training efficiently. Those 12 sets might be enough to maximize your rate of muscle growth.

You can take it one step further. You could swap those barbell curls for an exercise that challenges your biceps under a deeper stretch, such as a lying biceps curl. Now you’re stimulating even more muscle growth per set. You might only need 9 sets per week.

There are a few ways to stimulate more muscle growth per set:

• Choose good exercises. Lifts that challenge your muscles through a deep range of motion tend to stimulate more muscle growth. For example, dips for your chest, front squats for your quads, and Romanian deadlifts for your hamstrings.
• Challenge the muscle you want to grow. Compound exercises are better for some muscles than others. Bench presses and dips are perfectly good for your chest but not your triceps. Skull crushers and overhead triceps extensions are much better at challenging your triceps through a deep range of motion.
• Train hard enough. Stopping 0–2 reps away from failure tends to give you the most muscle growth per set. You can do easier sets, but it might take more of them.
• Lift in the hypertrophy rep range. Anywhere from 4–40 reps can be good for building muscle, but sets of 6–30 reps tend to be more efficient, allowing you to build more muscle with every set.
• Get enough rest between sets. Resting for 2–5 minutes between sets allows you to lift more weight and/or do more reps in subsequent sets, stimulating more muscle growth. Short rest times can also be great for building muscle, but you’ll need to do more sets.
• Train often enough. If you cram all your volume into a single workout, the later sets won’t stimulate as much growth as the earlier ones. Better to spread your training volume throughout the week, doing more like 4–8 sets per workout 2–4 times per week. That way, each set is stimulative.

The Ideal AMOUNT of Training Volume

Low-Volume vs High-Volume Bodybuilding

Ever since Arthur Jones and Mike Mentzer popularized High-Intensity Training (HIT) in the 1970s, some bodybuilders have argued that lower-volume workout programs stimulate more muscle growth. That was a perfectly fine idea back then. There wasn’t any research on training volume yet, and low-volume routines worked quite well for some guys. However, some people didn’t gain any muscle whatsoever and were dubbed “non-responders.”

Meanwhile, bodybuilders like Arnold Schwarzenegger were following incredibly high-volume workout routines, doing as many as twelve long workouts per week. This approach stimulated muscle growth in everyone, but it was also fairly common to get overuse injuries. People were suffering from sore joints, tendon pain, and the dread of being buried under an avalanche of volume.

You could argue that Arnold Schwarzenegger was a more successful bodybuilder than Mike Mentzer, so higher-volume routines must be better. But looking at professional bodybuilders isn’t a good way to figure out what works best for natural lifters with average genetics.

That’s where James Krieger, MS, comes in. He was the first person to dig through the data and publish a meta-analysis on how training volume affects muscle growth (study). He concluded that both Mike Mentzer and Arnold Schwarzenegger were wrong. Doing more sets does stimulate more muscle growth, but only up to a point.

Krieger noticed that with shorter rest times (under 2 minutes between sets), some studies found benefits from doing as many as 45 sets per muscle. However, if you rest for longer (3–5 minutes between sets), the benefit of high-volume training disappears.

For example, one study found that doing 12 sets per week was enough to maximize muscle growth in the quads. The groups doing 18 and 24 sets per workout gained slightly less muscle, though the results weren’t significant.

The recent Baz-Valle meta-analysis confirmed Krieger’s findings, showing that 12–20 sets per muscle per week maximized muscle growth (study).

Interestingly, this is more similar to how the best natural bodybuilders trained in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. Guys like Steve Reeves trained 3x per week, doing just a few sets per exercise.

How Do You Count Volume from Compound Lifts?

There are different ways to count volume. A set of barbell rows counts as a set for your upper back, but does it count as a set for your biceps? What about your forearms? And your spinal erectors? Most studies would count it as a set for every muscle involved, leading to quite a lot of confusion.

In my case, counting compound lifts as volume for my biceps, triceps, and hamstrings caused me to build a “Spider Physique,” with thin arms and legs dangling from a muscular torso. That’s because most compound lifts stimulate more muscle growth in the torso than the limbs.

For example, the bench press stimulates about twice as much growth in your chest as in your triceps (study). This can make it seem like your chest needs 8 sets of bench presses (8 total sets), whereas your triceps need an additional 8 sets of triceps extensions (16 total sets).

But your chest and triceps don’t necessarily need different training volumes. More likely, they just benefit from different exercises. Skull crushers stimulate your triceps about as well as bench presses stimulate your chest:

One way to fix the problem is to count suboptimal sets as half sets. 1 set of bench presses would count as 0.5 sets for your triceps. However, that can make it seem like doing 10 sets of bench presses works your triceps as well as 5 sets of triceps extensions.

10 sets of bench presses wouldn’t fully stimulate the long head of your triceps and might not work any heads hard enough to stimulate much growth. If you want balanced muscle growth, you need a balanced mix of exercises that stimulate every muscle properly.

I start by programming the compound exercises and then fill in the gaps. In this case, your biceps and triceps get some stimulus from pushing/pulling, so they don’t need that much more. If you want balanced growth, you could do 10 sets of pushing/pulling exercises and 5 sets of curls/extensions.

Do Different Muscles Need Different Training Volumes?

There’s this old idea that different muscles benefit from different training volumes. There’s some truth to that idea, but it seems to have more to do with exercise selection than the unique physiology of different muscles.

Some muscles have access to better exercises. For example, hamstrings are famous for only needing a few hard sets per week. This might be because hamstrings have more fast-twitch muscle fibres, but I suspect it’s because Romanian deadlifts—the most popular hamstring exercise—train your hamstrings under a deep stretch.

If I’m right, muscles that can be challenged under a deep stretch don’t need as much volume. By contrast, muscles that are harder to work at long muscle lengths, such as your back muscles, benefit from higher training volumes.

How Many Sets Should You Do Per Muscle?

• Chest and front delts: 9–18 sets per week. It won’t take much to punish your pecs and front delts. Most pressing exercises work your chest hard under a deep stretch. Think of barbell bench presses and push-ups. You can take this even further with dips, dumbbell bench presses, deficit push-ups, and dumbbell flyes.
• Upper Back: 12–30 sets per week. Your back can take a beating. Most back exercises are challenging when your back muscles are contracted. Think of chin-ups, pull-ups, and rows, which are hardest at the top of the range of motion. These are still the best back exercises, but you may need to do more sets. (You may be able to get more bang for your buck by including pullovers and lat prayers.)
• Quads: 9–18 sets per week. Quads are easy to train at longer muscle lengths, especially if you favour exercises like goblet squats, front squats, and leg presses.
• Hamstrings: 6–12 sets per week. Romanian deadlifts, good mornings, and seated hamstring curls all work your hamstrings under a tremendous stretch. It doesn’t take much.
• Side delts: 9–18 sets per week. Most people train their side delts with exercises that are hardest at shorter muscle lengths. Think of overhead presses, upright rows, face pulls, and standing lateral raises. These are all great exercises, but you might be able to get more stimulation per set from lying lateral raises.
• Biceps: 6–12 sets per week. If you count your back exercises as biceps work, they can handle quite a lot of volume. However, if you’re training them directly with exercises like biceps curls, preacher curls, incline curls, and lying biceps curls, you can do well with as few as 8 sets per week.
• Triceps: 6–12 sets per week. Pressing exercises aren’t an efficient way to bulk up your triceps, but triceps extensions are, and both skull crushers and overhead extensions challenge your triceps through a deep range of motion.
• Forearms: 0–18 sets per week. Your forearms can handle a tremendous amount of volume, which is good because you use them in almost every exercise. They may grow just fine without any isolation work. If they don’t, try wrist curls and reverse curls.
• Traps: 0–18 sets per week. Your traps support your shoulder girdle during compound lifts, including deadlifts, chin-ups, overhead presses, and rows. You probably don’t need to isolate them.
• Abs: 0–18 sets per week. Compound lifts often do a decent job of stimulating your abs, but for guys with small or stubborn abs, direct ab training can certainly help. Think of exercises like knee raises, leg raises, crunches, and reverse crunches.
• Glutes: 0–12 sets per week. Deadlifts and squats both challenge your glutes under a deep stretch, so you probably don’t need any extra glute work. If you do, hip thrusts are the obvious choice.
• Calves: 12–18 sets per week. Calves aren’t trained by any compound exercises. If you want bigger calves, you’ll need to do calf raises.
• Neck: 9–18 sets per week. Your neck isn’t trained by any compound exercises, either. If you want a thicker neck, you’ll need neck curls and extensions.

How Many Sets Should You Do Per Workout?

You should do 3–12 sets per muscle per workout and train your muscles at least twice per week. The more often you train your muscles, the fewer sets you need per workout. For example, if you’re trying to do 12 sets per muscle per week, you can spread your volume out like this:

• 6 sets of biceps curls 2x per week.
• 4 sets of biceps curls 3x per week.
• 3 sets of biceps curls 4x per week.

Most hypertrophy training workout routines train each muscle at least twice per week. That’s true of all full-body workout routines, most 4-day and 5-day splits, and almost all 6-day splits. Most splits let you spread out your volume properly, meaning most splits can be ideal for stimulating muscle growth.

If you’re a beginner, you can start with 3 full-body workouts per week, doing 3–6 sets per muscle each workout. As an intermediate, you might want to use a workout split that trains your muscles twice per week, doing 6–8 sets per muscle per workout.

The elephant in the room is the Bro Split, where you only train a muscle once per week. In that case, you might want to do as many as 12 sets per body part in a single workout. Or you can adjust the routine to give it a better training frequency (as explained in our Bro Split article).

For example, instead of stacking all your arm training into Arm Day, shift some of your biceps curls to Back Day and some of your triceps extensions to Chest Day, spreading out your arm volume. That will free up room for chin-ups and close-grip bench presses on Arm Day, spreading out your chest and back volume. You can also do deadlifts on Back Day, spreading out your lower body and spinal erector volume.

When Should You Add More Sets?

Scarpelli and colleagues had subjects train one of their legs with 20% more volume than they were used to and the other leg with an “optimal” volume of 22 sets per week (study). After 8 weeks, they found that adding 20% more volume stimulated about 50% more muscle growth than suddenly switching to an optimized program. These findings have been replicated by more recent research (study).

As you get used to a training program, your muscles will grow bigger, stronger, and also tougher. It will take higher training volumes to continue stimulating muscle growth. Your muscles will also be able to recover from those higher training volumes. This is called the Repeated Bout Effect (RBE).

Let’s say you’re squatting 3 times per week, doing 3 challenging sets per workout. That’s a total of 9 challenging sets per week. That’s a great place to start.

After a couple of weeks, 3 sets might not give your quads the same amount of stimulation. You might have the energy to do more, you may not feel as sore afterwards, and your strength gains may stall. At that point, consider adding a 4th set, bumping your training volume up to 12 sets per week. When that stops working, consider a 5th set.

When the ever-increasing volume becomes unmanageable, take a deload week, dropping the volume to just 2–3 sets per exercise. Then you can climb back up again, maybe focusing on different exercises, different muscle groups, or switching up your rep ranges.

Volume for Specialization Phases

A specialization phase is when you reduce your training volume for some muscles to free up recovery for others. For example, you could lower your leg volume to 6 sets per week and raise your biceps/triceps/shoulder volume to 30 sets per week.

A recent study by Enes and colleagues put the participants on a specialization program where they trained their quads with up to 52 sets per week (study). The first group of participants stuck with 22 sets per week, the second group added 4 sets every second week, and the third group added 6 sets every second week.

By the end of the program, the third group was doing 52 sets per week for their quads. That sounds like it would be more than they could recover from, but it wasn’t. They gained over twice as much muscle as the group that stuck with 22 sets.

52 sets isn’t as overbearing as it sounds. If you did 10 sets of squats, bench presses, deadlifts, chin-ups, and overhead presses every week, you’d be doing 50 total sets per week. If you added in assistance and accessory exercises, you could easily get to over 100 sets. What’s impressive is that pouring all of that energy into just quad exercises worked so well.

I prefer a slightly more balanced approach. Instead of dropping the other exercises entirely, I recommend shifting most of your muscles to maintenance, doing 2–6 sets per week. You can also emphasize more than one muscle group per specialization phase, working up to 30–40 sets for a few different muscles

I’ve gotten some of my best muscle growth from specialization phases. I added 2 inches to my arms by focusing on my biceps and triceps for 3 months. I started with 2 sets per exercise and added more volume every week.

The Minimum Volume Needed to Build Muscle

Low-volume workout routines won’t fully maximize your rate of muscle growth, but they can still be enough to make progress. If you can make progress for long enough, you’ll still get there in the end.

• One systematic review found that untrained lifters could gain muscle with as few as 3 sets per muscle per week (study).
• A more recent study found that 2–3 sets per movement pattern was enough to gain strength. The participants could bench 220 pounds and squat 330. You might need more volume if you’re stronger than that (study).

If you’re doing fewer sets, it helps to push them harder. Most studies that show good results from lower training volumes have the participants training quite hard, taking their sets all the way to failure.

Gaining muscle more slowly sounds bad, but there are a few ways you can use it to your advantage:

• More efficient training routines: The law of diminishing returns kicks in fairly early with training volume. You might be able to do 50% of the work and make 80% of the progress.
• You can train with a lower volume on some muscle groups to free up energy for muscles you’re more eager to grow. For example, you could do the minimum effective volume for your quads to give yourself more time and energy to train your lagging shoulders.
• You can make steady progress even when you aren’t fully invested in the gym. You might be happy building muscle more slowly when life gets busier or more stressful.
• Lower training volumes might make your muscles more sensitive to muscle growth. If you get used to lower volumes, your muscles regain their sensitivity to the stimulus of lifting weights. For example, if you ease back on arm training for a few months, you might get better results when you switch to an arm specialization phase.

Summary

The ideal training volume for building muscle is around 9–22 sets per muscle per week. If you choose great exercises, do 6–30 reps per set, and bring those sets within 0–2 reps of failure, the bottom end of that range is often enough to maximize muscle growth.

Start with a lower training volume and increase it gradually. Doing more sets isn’t always better, especially at first. 2–3 sets per exercise is plenty for beginners. You can get dramatic newbie gains with as few as 9 sets per muscle per week.

If you want a minimalist routine, start with 2–5 sets per week. Track your strength from week to week to see if it’s enough. Add more sets if you need to.

Alright, that’s it for now. If you want a full muscle-building program, including a 5-month workout routine, diet guide, recipe book, and online coaching, check out ourBony to Beastly Program (for men) or Bony to Bombshell Program (for women). If you want a customizable intermediate muscle-building program, check out ourOutlift Hypertrophy Program.