[Music] one of the most common areas of confusion among lifters is figuring out exactly how many sets one should do in a workout on the one hand you have minimalist who offer lower volume approaches with some saying that even just one set taken to failure in a workout is sufficient whereas others are in favor of higher volume approaches and working each muscles to the point of exhaustion each workout so who's right well in this video we'll figure out just that by using current scientific evidence to determine exactly how many sets per workout you should be
doing to maximize growth but first off let's discuss what exactly we mean by set so just to be clear a set in this case will refer to a set performed within the 6 to 12 rep range since this is in line with the research I'll be going through if you do less reps on this then you'll need more sets and vice-versa also each set should be taken close to failure with high effort so obviously a warm-up set won't count as your real set so with that being said let's find out exactly how many sets per
workout is optimal so we know based on recent research that to a certain extent more volume leads to more growth for instance a 2010 meta-analysis by James Krieger found that as you increase the number of sets performed per exercise muscle growth increases well in fact when you compare four to six sets to a single set you experience around 80 to 85 percent more growth and then further support of this positive relationship between training volume and hypertrophy is a more recent 2017 meta-analysis which found a dose-response relationship between sets per muscle per week and resulting muscle
growth so based on this alone we think that the more volume the better and the performing 5 sets for all the exercises in our workouts we're just trying to do as much as possible will be optimal for growth but upon further analysis we realize that this just isn't the case and in fact doing so can be detrimental this is because there actually seems to be an upper limit of sets per muscle group that you can do in a single workout before it starts to do more harm than good and as for an estimate as to
what this number is researchers James Krieger provide some insight what he did is he took a deeper look into the previous meta-analysis I mentioned and found that limit to be roughly 10 sets per muscle group so for example in your chest day performing more than 10 hard sets dedicated to your chest would likely just begin to provide diminishing returns and start to Imperial recovery something widely known as junk volume now of course this will vary individually and depends on the nature of the exercises you perform and the limit is likely higher for more trained individuals
nonetheless it still is a good rough estimate that's in line with past research on the topic so what exactly does this mean for you and how you should structure your training well it just means that you need to use the right training frequency and spread out your sets accordingly but this is going to enable you to avoid doing too much in one workout and helps them minimize any excess junk volume to clear up any confusion let's use a step by step example that you can follow so we know based on the 2017 meta-analysis mentioned earlier
that roughly 10 to 20 sets per muscle per week is a sweet spot for maximizing growth with beginners being at the lower end of this range and more experienced lifters being at the higher end of this range so let's say you're a fairly experienced lifter requiring 16 sets per muscle per week we'll use chess as an example rather than using a bro split and hammering all of the 16 sets into one chess day would instead be best to split the required number of chess sets into at least two days per week to be trained with
other muscle groups but for example using something like an upper lower split this way you can perform these sets with better quality to remain under the estimated 10 separate session threshold and you'll now be training each muscle at the optimum for any frequency of two times per week all leading to better gains and more efficient recovery in the long run in fact a study by Beck grotto and colleagues compared this exact idea the researchers compared training each muscle group once a week with sixteen cents per session with twice a week with eight cents per session
after eight weeks they found that the eight cents per session group experienced similar but slightly greater muscle growth and a greater improvement and training low volume when compared to the sixteen cents per session group and the researchers speculate that these findings would likely reach greater significance if the study was done longer which is just further evidence suggesting that refraining from doing too much volume for a muscle group in a single session is lightly best for hypertrophy in the long run and that's basically all there is to it first figure out what you want to set
your weekly target sets per muscle to be and then work backwards to split that up most effectively throughout the week each workout can consist of a total of around 15 to 25 sets but the number of sets for a specific muscle group in that work oh it should be at around 10 or below but obviously this does depend on several factors and lastly just always keep in mind that research tells us about averages some people respond better to higher training of volumes whereas others respond better to lower training volumes meaning that you'll want to use
the guidelines shown in this video as a rough starting point but you should then be adjusting it over time based on how your body progresses so the southern video up here are the main points to keep in mind I think that a lot of people are under the wrong impression that more is better and that they have to completely annihilate their muscles every single workout in order for them to grow and I asked to do this as well but it wasn't until I cut out all the excess jump volume that I was doing and instead
focused more on progression that I've really started to see results not much faster and for an all-in-one science-based program that shows you exactly how to do this but optimizing every aspect of your training and your nutrition for you such that you can build muscle and lose fat as quickly as possible then you can simply head on over to built with science comm and take the starting point analysis quiz which is going to determine what program and what approach is best for you anyways if you haven't already I'd really appreciate you following Instagram I post a
lot more informative videos and content on there which I think a lot of you will find useful and as always if you enjoyed this video please don't forget to give it a like maybe comment down below subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications from my channel as well as this all really does help me yeah thank you so much for all the continued support everyone I really do appreciate it do let me know what other topics you'd like to see me cover and I'll do my best to cover them see you next time
