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What Number of Sets and Reps Works Best?

Most people think the primary driver for muscle growth is volume, but most of these same people define volume as the number of sets you're performing in a training session (not counting your warm-up sets, mind you).

More accurately defined, volume is sets x reps x loading (weight). Total tonnage – that's what really determines growth. Let's take a look at a solid study that proves it, along with defining the exact amount of volume that builds the most muscle.

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Study Design

Barbalho, et al. separated 40 experienced female lifters into four groups. Each group trained to failure using a different amount of volume.

• Average Age: 24-25 years old
• Training Experience: At least three years
• Length of Study: 24 weeks

Note that a resistance training study done for 24 weeks is very rare. The usual is 8 to 12 weeks. We're literally looking at six months worth of training with a 100% completion rate by the subjects. That means all 40 women who started the study finished it. Fantastic.

The Program

Each group did a different amount of total sets per workout:

• 5 sets per workout
• 10 sets per workout
• 15 sets per workout
• 20 sets per workout

The program itself was done three days a week, hitting each muscle group once a week.

Monday Training

• A. Barbell Bench Press
• B. Incline Barbell Press
• C. Barbell Military Press


• The 5 set group did 2 sets of bench presses, 2 sets of inclines, and 1 set of military presses.
• The 10 set group did 4 sets of bench presses, 4 sets of inclines, and 2 sets of military presses.
• The 15 set group did 5 sets of bench presses, 5 sets of inclines, and 5 sets of military presses.
• The 20 set group did 7 sets of bench presses, 7 sets of inclines, and 6 sets of military presses.

Thursday Training

• A. Lat Pulldown
• B. Cable Row
• C. Upright Row


• The 5 set group did 2 sets of pulldowns, 2 sets of cable rows, and 1 set of upright rows.
• The 10 set group did 4 sets of pulldowns, 4 sets of cable rows, and 2 sets of upright rows.
• The 15 set group did 5 sets of pulldowns, 5 sets of cable rows, and 5 sets of upright rows.
• The 20 set group did 7 sets of pulldowns, 7 sets of cable rows, and 6 sets of upright rows.

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Friday Training

• A. 45-Degree Leg Press
• B. Barbell Squat
• C. Stiff Legged Deadlift


• The 5 set group did 2 sets of leg presses, 2 sets of squats, and 1 set of stiff legged deadlifts.
• The 10 set group did 4 sets of leg presses, 4 sets of squats, and 2 sets of stiff legged deadlifts.
• The 15 set group did 5 sets of leg presses, 5 sets of squats, and 5 sets of stiff legged deadlifts.
• The 20 set group did 7 sets of leg presses, 7 sets of squats, and 6 sets of stiff legged deadlifts.

Rep Periodization

The scientists periodized the training so that the lifters used different rep schemes each week. Then they rotated back around each month:

• Week 1: 12-15 reps, 30-60 seconds rest between sets
• Week 2: 4-6 reps, 3-4 minutes rest between sets
• Week 3: 10-12 reps, 1-2 minutes rest between sets
• Week 4: 6-8 reps, 2-3 minutes rest between sets

This periodization model was repeated six times (there's your 24 weeks).

The Results

The researchers tested the women's 10-rep max on the bench press, lat pulldown, leg press, and stiff-legged deadlift at the beginning of the study. The scientists also measured muscle thickness of the biceps, triceps, pecs, quads, and glutes. The tests and measurements were repeated after 24 weeks. This is what they found:

• All groups showed significant increases in all muscle thickness measurements and 10-rep max tests.
• There were no differences in any 10-rep max tests between the 5 and 10 set groups.
• The 5 and 10 set groups showed significantly greater 10-rep max increases for lat pulldowns, leg presses, and stiff-legged deadlifts than the 15-set group.
• For the bench press, the results from the 5, 10, and 15 set groups didn't differ significantly, but the 20-set group tested out the worst. In fact, 10-rep max changes for the 20-set group were lower than all other groups for all exercises.
• As for muscle thickness improvement, as you might expect, it correlated with the strength gains. The 5 and 10 set groups showed significantly greater increases than the 15 and 20 set groups in all measured sites.
• Muscle thickness increased more in the 15 set group than the 20 set group in all sites. The increases in the 5-set group were higher than the 10 set group for the pecs, whereas the 10-set group showed higher increases in quadriceps muscle thickness than the 5-set group.

To put this in perspective, the 20-set group exhibited about a quarter of the gains that the 10 set group did.

A Possible Flaw in Their Findings?

The one argument against this study is that the subjects in the 15 and 20 set groups probably did too much volume in their sessions and exceeded their capacity to recover. If the work load had been spread out over more training days in the week, the outcome could have been different.

Nice try, but they didn't exceed their maximum recoverable volume in a single session! Look at the following sentence, taken straight from the study:

'All groups significantly increased in all muscle thickness measurements and 10-rep max tests at the end of the 24 weeks.'

All the groups improved in strength and size by the end of the 24 weeks. If the 15 and 20 set groups were exceeding their 'maximum recoverable volume in a single session,' they sure as hell wouldn't end up with gains after six months of doing it every week. So that argument doesn't hold up at all.

Still, it should give you pause. Just because you're making progress, it doesn't mean you're training optimally. This study is a clear-cut case where doing less meant gaining MORE.

Some of you wanna-be overachievers might ask, 'How would you change their program so that I'm hitting a muscle group twice a week?'

I wouldn't. To me, this study represented a large enough sample size with enough volume variations to see that some awesome strength and size gains can be made by training three days a week and hitting each muscle once during that training week.

The real-world anecdotal evidence tends to back this up. You can indeed train just three times a week, hitting a muscle once during that week, and make outstanding progress.

The Real Takeaway From This Study

When I eyeballed this study (along with literally a dozen others while researching this article), I saw a program that looked exactly like the kind of training I did as an intermediate and used to make awesome progress: A total of about 10 sets per body part, once a week.

Novice lifters often get caught up in overanalyzing every nuance related to training (especially in studies) and forget a very simple principle: If you want to grow, then you're going to have to be moving more weight for more reps six months from now.

That's what we saw here. The ones who increased their rep strength the most, grew the most. The driver was progressive overload. Not volume.

The other takeaway from this should be that your effort in the gym is what dictates volume – not establishing some arbitrary number of sets to be done and then down-regulating your effort to meet that number. That's literally how people end up doing junk volume.

Train your ass off. Beat rep PRs. Grow. It's that simple.

Related: The Perfect Number of Sets for Growth

Related: Training Frequency and Volume

Source

1. Barbalho M, Coswig VS, Steele J Fisher JP, Paoli A, Gentil P. 'Evidence for an Upper Threshold for Resistance Training Volume in Trained Women.' Med Sci Sports Exer 2019 Mar;51(3):515-522.

On the surface, stimulating muscle growth is easy: just lift the damn weight! This will work as long as you're progressively increasing the demand placed on the muscle over time (either by adding more weight, doing more reps at a given weight, doing more sets, increasing density, etc.). But it's still interesting to understand the factors that can contribute to making your muscles grow. We know that lifting weights builds muscle, but why?

Here are the main factors contributing to stimulating growth:

1) Intramuscular Tension: This refers to how hard a muscle must be contracted during the performance of an exercise. As such, it's directly correlated with the amount of force you have to produce.

More force equals great intramuscular tension. A high level of intramuscular tension can influence muscle growth because it leads to a high rate of protein degradation (more tension = faster muscle damage). In that regard, see tension as a punch: the harder you punch someone, the more damage it'll do.

However, the more you put into a punch, the fewer swings you can take at your opponent. It's impossible to effectively throw 60 uppercuts in one round of boxing, but it is possible to throw that many jabs.

It's the same thing with weights: the more tension you produce, the less time you can sustain that tension. So while a high level of tension will cause rapid muscle damage, if it's too high (e.g. 1-3 maximal reps) the time spent causing damage to the muscle might not be long enough to elicit a maximal growth response.

But still, high tension will stimulate muscle growth. It also has another interesting impact: the recruitment of the high-threshold motor units (fast-twitch fibers). The more force (tension) you produce, the more HTMUs you'll recruit.

2) Time Under Tension: If a high intramuscular tension represents an uppercut, a long time under tension is kinda' like hitting your opponent 60-80 times in a round. The more often you hit your adversary, the more potential damage you can cause.

If a set lasts longer, the time spent causing muscle damage is more important and thus can lead to more growth stimulation. The problem is that there's an inverse relationship between the magnitude of the tension and the time that it can be sustained: if you shoot for a very long set, you won't be able to do the set under a lot of tension.

So while you might spend a lot of seconds working at causing muscle damage, you're actually not causing a lot of damage per second. You can bitch-slap an opponent a thousand times, but it won't knock him out! Just like with tension – increasing the time under tension of a set will lead to more growth stimulation, but only if the tension level stays relatively high.

3) Blood Vessel Occlusion, Metabolite Accumulation, Hormonal Output: You might have heard of 'kaatsu' or tourniquet training. It's a training method that relies on lifting light weights (20-30% of your maximum for 15-30 reps) while wearing a special cuff that's tightened up around the proximal end of a limb to restrict blood flow to the muscle.

Studies have shown that despite the light weights being used, the muscle growth response is as big as lifting heavy weights (80% and more). The reason is the blood occlusion, which has been shown to create a deprived oxygen state (since blood flow to the muscle is limited, so is oxygen transport). This leads to an accumulation of lactate which increases the production of both hGH (growth hormone) and IGF-1 (Takareda et al. 2000).

The lack of oxygen (hypoxic state) and increase in acidity has also been shown to increase the recruitment of fast-twitch muscle fibers (Shinohara and Moritani, 1992). In fact, oxygen restriction to the muscle increases fast-twitch recruitment, firing rate, and spike amplitude (Yasuda, 2005).

Finally, exercise with restricted oxygen/blood entry in the trained muscle also leads to the production of Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS), which increase muscle satellite cell activation and proliferation (two key phenomenon involved in the muscle growth process).

The good news is that you don't have to use kaatsu training (which can be risky) to create this oxygen/blood flow restriction to the muscle. Sustained muscle tension (as in never allowing a muscle to relax during a set) can make muscle hypoxic even without external occlusion (Bonde-Peteron et al. 1975, Mitchell et al. 1980).

A recent study compared several training protocols' effects on oxygen levels during the execution of an exercise. With kaatsu training, oxygen levels were at around 22% of the rested/normal state, compared to 32-35% for normal, heavy training – a difference that can explain the efficacy of kaatsu training.

However, they also found that performing sets without blocking blood flow, but using a 303 tempo and never allowing the muscles to relax during the set (always flexing as hard as possible during every inch of every rep) with 50-60% of the maximum performed to failure, led to oxygen levels of 23-24%. Lactate, hGH, and IGF-1 levels were also the same as with kaatsu training.

The moral of the story is that constant tension exercises can build size and strength despite using relatively light weights and even if muscle damage is fairly low. However, if the muscle is allowed to relax during the set, oxygen and blood will flow into the muscle and you won't reach optimal benefits.

So, we could say that muscle growth can be stimulated by:

1. Heavy lifting (4-6 reps), which promotes a high rate of mechanical damage/protein degradation.

2. Relatively high reps (up to 12-15 for the upper body and 15-20 for the lower body), which promote a high mechanical degradation due to the combination of moderate time under tension and intramuscular tension magnitude.

3. Constant tension sets. To do these properly, you must flex the target muscle hard during every inch of every rep. You can never allow the muscle to relax. This means no rest between reps either. This method is best kept for isolation exercises.

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You could take advantage of all three methods by designing your program according to this template:

Exercise 1: Heavy lift (4-6 reps) using a basic, multi-joint exercise

Exercise 2: Moderate rep movement (8-10) using another multi-joint exercise

Exercise 3: High rep movement (12-15) using a secondary exercise

Exercise 4: Constant tension movement (303 tempo, 50-60% of maximum, 8-12 reps) using an isolation exercise

A chest workout might look something like this:

A. Decline bench press

4-5 x 4-6 reps
90-120 seconds of rest

B. Incline dumbbell press

3 x 8-10 reps
75 seconds of rest

C. Cable crossover or lying crossover

3 x 12-15 reps
60 seconds of rest

D. Squeeze press (pressing the dumbbells together as you simultaneously lift them)

3 x 8-12 using a 303 tempo
45 seconds of rest

Conclusion

It's clear that muscle is stubborn; that it often resists our best efforts to prod it into growth, but perseverance, a little smarts, and varying strategies will win the battle and the war.

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