How many sets per muscle per week to build muscle?
5, 10 or 20 sets? What research says about training volume, and how to increase it without burning out.
When you are trying to build muscle, the volume question keeps coming back: should you do 3 sets of chest per session, or 15? The simplest way to answer it is to count sets per muscle per week, however you split your sessions. That is the unit research uses, and the easiest one to track.
What the research says
In 2017, Brad Schoenfeld and colleagues pooled 15 studies to measure how weekly volume affects muscle growth. Their conclusion: there is a dose-response relationship. The more weekly sets, the greater the gain in muscle mass, at least within the volumes studied.
Each additional weekly set was associated with roughly 0.37% more muscle growth. When programs were grouped into three categories, fewer than 5, 5 to 9, and 10 or more sets per muscle, the 10+ group got the best results.
Practical guidelines
- Beginners: 5 to 10 sets per muscle per week is plenty to progress in the first few months.
- Regular lifters: 10 or more sets per muscle per week is a good target to keep building muscle.
- Increase gradually: add one or two sets per muscle when you plateau, rather than doubling your volume overnight.
- Count hard sets, the ones that end a few reps short of failure. Warm-up sets do not count.
More is not always better: past a certain volume, fatigue builds up faster than progress. If your weights drop from one week to the next, that is a sign to back off rather than add even more sets.
Volume does not replace progression
Doing 20 sets with the same weights for months will not keep you growing forever. Volume and progressive overload go together: enough volume, and weights or reps that go up over the weeks.
Tracking your volume with Loaden
- In the program builder, you pick exercises by muscle group or straight from the anatomy view, so you see at a glance which muscles you are working.
- Stats track your total volume, how your weights evolve, and your session count.
- The weekly recap shows what is improving, what is stalling, and the one thing to change to move again.
Sources
Know what you actually do each week
Loaden logs every set and shows you each week what is improving and what is stalling.
