Stop Overdoing It! How Many Sets Should You Really Be Doing?

hey folks it's me Dr Mike Israel for Renaissance periodization and I have a question for you are you doing too much volume and your muscle growth training plan to get your best growth possible and if you are doing too much volume how can you tell like intellectually we know for sure there's doing too little if you did like one push-up a day can't say your chest is going to grow as much as it would if you did more than one push-up a day but there's also a certain number of well anything but push-ups per day

that you can do then it tires you out so much and it taxes your recovery abilities so much that you could get better doing less volume now we know through just talking to people that a lot of people have experimented with high volume programs and then they went back to lower volume programs and got the gains of their lives after going back to lower volume which is a very clear way to illustrate this happens to tons of people as a matter of fact if it's happened to you in the uh in the video uh please

just hit up uh hit us up in the comments tell us your story tell us about a time where you used to do higher volume programs and you were getting results or good results but not amazing and then you switch to lower volumes and things went better you can also tell us the opposite story if you time where you know you did less and then you did more and it got better that's less of a mysterious thing because we know volume has a dose response relationship up to a point the more volume you do the

better but here we're talking about what that point is and what this curve on this end looks like because you still make gains on this end here's the zero point all the way from the peak gains to no gains there's still gains to be made we want to make sure that if you're here we put you back over here that you're doing less volume but getting the same or even better growth how do we go about intellectually examining that we know it's a real thing in the world first thing biggest thing if you are hitting

many PR's in reps or load you're doing 200 pounds for 11 Reps versus 10 you're doing 205 pounds for 10 Reps versus 200 pounds for 10 reps last time if you're making these little progressions on average over time you're good to go fundamentally you don't need to care about this at all you're really good to go your volume is not fundamentally misaligned it's clearly Within between your minimum effective volume and maximum recoverable because you're making gains duh and you can always keep going and just make changes at the margins do a little bit of less

volume and do a little bit more volume so that's definitely a thing that means you can just keep training the same and not change a thing however however we have to ask the next question is like yes okay you're making PRS but maybe if you did lower volumes you would make even bigger PR's in uh your performance you could do more reps every week on average more weight every week on average because you're not as tired from all that volume and potentially grow even more muscle doing less volume and again we know this happens practically

we've talked to lots of people who'd happen to please share your story below if you want and we know theoretically it has to occur because the maximum adaptive volume at the top of the curve is pretty far away from the maximum recoverable volume and you could be doing a lot of work in between here that's like more work than you should be doing for Less results than you should be getting still positive results but you could be spending less time in the gym doing less work having more fun doing it because you're less fatigued you

can get stronger faster and everything could go better how do you know if you're in that position well first there are more likely situations that you're in that position than not even before doing this alternate way of training this big change that I'll propose later in this video for the very serious of you that really do think man I really do think I'm doing way too much before you conclude you're doing way too much let me read you off a list of likely situations in which every single checklist item that you check this applies to

me this applies to me this applies to me builds our case a little bit more that you're probably doing a little bit too much and could benefit more likely by pulling back so here's the thing first if you're objectively as compared to the studied population of athletes doing a higher end of volume so for example if you tell me yeah man I do three sets of chest per week I think I'm overdoing it come on the direct literature says you can on average handle a lot more now maybe you have a particular case where your

genetics and Recovery are weird and for you three sets of chest a week is too much but like I don't think that's the case however if per session let's say you hit chest twice a week or three times a week if per session for chest as an example for any muscle here you're doing consistently more than eight working sets you're doing a lot of volume and the chance that it's not enough volume is a very low the chance that it's a little bit too much volume to get your best gains just exact uh subject of

this video is pretty decent if you're telling me you're doing eight sets of chest three times a week but your chest isn't progressing as much as you want I'm not inclined to believe that more chest work is probably the right answer if you're doing four sets of chest three times a week I'm inclined to believe that doing five or six or seven will get you better results so first check mark is you're doing plenty of volume and for me plenty of volume is eight sets per muscle group or above for reference Jeff nippard's analysis of

the data shows that about six hard-working sets per muscle per session is basically Optimum so this is eight it's even further removed with more volume down on that end of the spectrum so it's unlikely that it's not enough now it's possible that it's not enough but less likely than it is you're doing a little bit too much next your performance plateaus maybe even every two to three weeks and you have to back off you feel like you're training a ton but every two to three weeks you get so tired that you're unable to beat your

matcher reps from last time you take a recovery half week you take a deal and everything gets better you do it again and within two to three weeks you crash and burn again that is another thing telling me you're trying to do a little bit too much volume at a time another one is oftentimes your muscles feel flat and tired and empty people talk you know about how their training feels like man I love this low volume chain and get in there my muscles are swollen I get up sore every single rep I feel like

they're gonna explode and you're like yeah yeah it's interesting what do you how's your training I feel really tired and like trained but like it's high volume you're supposed to feel like that now if it's high volume and you're recovering from it you're not supposed to feel like that if it's high volume and you're barely recovering and making small gains but you're carrying way more fatigue than you should be it will feel like this that tired drained no pump feeling that's not a good thing that means you're doing a little bit too much and you

could back off so there's another little hint another one is your pump Peaks early in the workout and then recedes during the rest of the workout so if you're doing 12 sets for chest you do some bench presses your pump is glorious you do some flies your pump is the best then you do some deficit push-ups and by the end of deficit push-ups you actually have less of a chest pump than when you were doing the the Flies and you're like is this good idea no your pump is supposed to be the biggest it ever

is when you walk out of the gym at the end of the workout if at some point your pump starts to take a turn for the worst while you're still doing working sets for that muscle group a very highly likely that those extra working sets are a bad thing you would be better off without them you could grow more without them and over the course of weeks to bring it back to the point before this that your muscles feel tired Etc you could just not be getting great pumps for a few weeks and you're doing

all this volume and you think well it's got to have some kind of effect but if your pumps aren't great and they're usually good with lower volumes not great so another more technical way I can put that point is this if you've trained with a certain amount of volume let's say 10 sets per week per muscle group and you got a good pump on average now that you're training with 15 you're getting a worse pump on average per session very possible I would even say likely that you're still making gains but not as many as

you could because you're on that excessively high end of of trading volume another hint is if your muscles are chronically still sore before you hit them again if you train hamstrings on Monday and Thursday and on Thursday you're still brutally sore from what you did Monday you're still trying to train through that soreness that was me under the table doing mock leg curls by the way then what are you doing your muscles still need to recover still need to grow that's what soreness is and in the middle of that process you're saying we got to

go again that's almost by definition doing too much volume in this case it's some combination of volume of frequency that you're doing wrong but in in any case if your muscles have plenty of time to heal and or they don't get super sore you know you're you might be overreaching but not a super big concern but if you're hammering your muscles before they've had a chance to recover and you're doing this often you're probably at least doing too much volume versus what you could be doing optimally another one is especially before those mini delos you

have to take too often your mind muscle connection starts to feel a little bit off your Technique feels a little bit off it just feels like it's too much stuff that's a hit that well it may be too much stuff and another last little hint to yourself as to if you're experiencing this if it's high rep sets of 20 to 30 you can add a rap and reload here and there and still progress but if it's lower upsets that's a 5 to 10 10 to 15 with heavier weight you're having a big time progressing the

reason that's the case is as you train with very high volumes possibly too high your muscle fibers start to change from being acting like the average slower twitch faster twitch combo fibers to more of the fibers that used to act in a faster twitch manner starting to act in a slower twitch manner and slower twitch muscles as they adapt their endurance goes up real fast which is why you get really good at doing High Reps and you can progress at High Reps but they're cross-sectional area their size and their strength doesn't change nearly as much

so when you go and do sets of five to ten if you're really struggling to add load to sets of five to ten and you're doing a ton of volume and you feel fatigued and all these things are happening yeah you're probably doing a bit too much volume you need to do less volume so that your fiber type transitions back into a faster twitch as you begin to progress again and since a 5 to 10 and 10 to 15 and all the rest of the rep ranges and not just turn into basically like an endurance

machine now if you're turning in a nurse machine you can recover really quick but so can marathon runners how come they're not jacked because they have the fiber type composition that allows them to recover fast and also prevents them from basically growing hardly at all you do not want to be in that position you do not want the gym to turn into a place where you do praying at the altar of high volume for meager Mana from Heaven you start rebelling against the old gods and then Zeus and they fight and all that stuff happens

eventually Arthur Jones comes in and hits everyone just kidding but on a serious note you don't want to just be doing volume for its own sake too much falling for its own sake is really just a bad idea so how do we pull back away if we're in this position if you have lots of these signs that I just sort of listed off you might be doing too much chronic volume just too much volume all the time you probably have high fatigue right now which is all those symptoms that I can't get a pump and

all this other stuff you're probably desensitized to high volume which means that your body will only grow if you give it high volumes and not that impressively but if you go back to low volumes your body's like I don't even tell we're training so it's not going to grow right away from low volumes if you switch which what a disaster that would be you're like okay I think I'm trading with too high volume you switch to lower volumes you go for a month and you barely grow it all and you're like okay well like I

guess that wasn't it what am I supposed to do but it could have been it you're just carrying way too much fatigue and you're way too desensitized how do we resensitize you to volume how do we lower your fatigue so you can progress again and the answer is you need a volume reset what the hell does that mean does it like the great reset where you dress up in a funny outfit talk to the World Bank maybe but a little bit simpler here it is we've got a multi-step guide for how to do your volume

reset and how to construct your first phase back if you think that you've been doing maybe a little bit too much volume here's the deal first finish your last mesocycle however it was written finish it do it really well instead of taking a deload after and then just going back into the next message cycle take an active rest phase which means one deload week like normal and then week one week of doing basically nothing just like frolicking in the field with your friends plenty of sleep plenty of food plenty of rest this is going to

heal your fatigue like crazy bring it down and also start to re-sensitize your muscles to volume because they're just not experiencing volume for weeks on end after this take two to four weeks of additional training at maintenance volume just enough volume to make sure your muscles don't get any smaller or weaker and no more volume than that so that while you're training a maintenance volume for two to four weeks you're maintaining the same physical characteristics your body is just the same size and strength and you're thinking what the am I doing I could be getting

better but hold on maintenance volume is such low volume that your volume sensitivity how much growth you will get out of any number of hard sets of training goes up and up and up this entire time you're essentially prepping the system to begin ready to grow again two to four weeks of Maintenance volume how much volume is that on average it's going to be about one third of your typical volume holy did I say that right I sure did it's really low and I know it sounds crazy but you will not lose muscle and strength

doing this in almost any case and anything you do lose in some weird way we'll come back within two weeks of you starting normal training again so don't you worry about it let me put this into perspective if on average over the course of a week you do 15 sets of quads for two to four weeks after your active rest is over in this Paradigm you're going to do five sets of quads per week that means three sets on Monday two sets on Thursday and that's it try to get them a little heavier than normal

this is not mandatory but sets a five to ten generally or better for maintenance than sets of you know 10 plus focus on technique it's just going to be like maybe four sessions a week and each session is going to be like 45 minutes if you're full-time super hardcore trainee the train six times a week for two hours at a time it's way less work your system and your local muscles will build an ability to be sensitive to that volume again the fatigue will come crashing down and then after that you are ready for a

really really serious approach back into training then you're ready for real training again so at the end of that two to four weeks one of those last week will be a deload as always so you basically deloaded twice in the last six weeks and then another Act of rest you're you are ready to go you are very very sensitive to training volume which means like if you do two hard sets of curls you'll blow up right away and get a huge pump in the super sore but you won't want to do that yet because we

want to ease in so how does that look like how do you construct your program back because remember we're not just going to go back to our same crazy high volume program we suspected it was too much volume so we're not going to do that we need to do a slightly different approach so here it is first you build your program as normal just build it normally all the suds and Reps and exercises when it comes to choosing how many sets you start out with go to half the normal amount if you normally do four

sets of bench press in week one of a program you're doing two if you normally do three sets of curls you're doing one or two sets there on the side of one half the set numbers this is on purpose we want to start you out on that lower end of volume and slowly come up to see if you experience better growth with lower volumes that's the whole purpose of this test Point number three keep your volume the same unless there's a very very clear impetus for you to increase the volume and then if there is

increase it only by one set at a time per session per week so for example if you have a terrible pump like zero pump the session is super easy you got no soreness at all no Doms you feel really barely doing anything okay you can add a set but if you're using one of our custom Training templates or anything like that what you want to do is just give middle of the road ratings for even the easy stuff so that your custom template keeps you on the low end of training volume so only increase if

you have a compelling reason to do so which comports with Point number four that if you have some pumps some sort of some fatigue even if it's not crazy just leave the volume alone remember those three sets of bench instead of going to five or six cents a bench we're gonna try keep doing three or four sets of bench for most of the meso to see if that lower volume still effective just like the higher volume was is a little bit more effective for Less fatigue if we're bringing you closer to that equilibrium point of

Maximum adaptive volume away from training almost at maximum recoverable volume all the time if you choose to increase a set add a set to leg press it had better be because it's just really really really profoundly easy no challenge at all anything the remote is like okay this is a workout don't increase from there in most cases if you're going to increase just add one set at a time so if two sets of leg press was like a clown show for you and you're like this is nothing had a third set don't go okay right

back to the old days I'm gonna go right to six of course that's going to tort you but maybe the torching was too much which is why we're starting off nice and slow if you have been overdoing volume and you are correct about it this new way of going on the lower end of volume still Progressive still hard training still quality sets but a little less volume than you used to should give you better results in rep strength gains in that mesocycle and I've seen this happen to tons of people they're doing German high volume

training they're cooking themselves all the time they take a little break they come back they do lower volume and within three weeks they're like I'm hitting Mega PR's on every single lift I feel so strong this is crazy weird how less fatigue makes you feel stronger you will feel this pretty damn quick and if that's the case stick to it you found a new volume Baseline that's your home base now you can go up a little in volume you can go down a little in volume but you found a real good thing that's better than

your last thing so don't just go back to that crazy abusive relationship you've had with training volume if you think okay yeah this two or three sets per muscle group per session thing works really well better than the eight sets I was doing but I think four or five cents could work better Hey listen I believe you ease into it though try three or four for a while a few weeks if that works great five forget about it try five some other time if three or four works okay try four or five if that works

way better hey then that's your new kind of Maximum adaptive volume range what I'm trying to tell you is this two or three sets or three or four sets per muscle per session starts to work way better than eight sets don't just be like all right that was great that worked let's go back to eight sets or don't be like okay okay but like six would work really ideally you don't know that your new home base is your new better guess at what you like it what's good for your body doesn't mean it's the ultimate

guess but it means this is where you know what's called like Bayesian statistical reasoning you start from the prior Assumption of yeah yeah two or three sets seems to be better for me than eight or ten so instead of cutting the middling just going right for six or five or whatever I'm gonna hang around two or three and maybe go to three or four and see how it goes that is probably a good way to look at it of course your fatigue will rise anyway after four or six weeks of this your fatigue will go

up you'll need a deload you'll recycle but then you look back on that program and you count the number of sets average that you did per muscle you say wow that was really like 10 sets per week for chest where I used to do 20 and you look back at how your progressions worked with 20 sets for the past few months and then you look at this past month and see how it went for 10. oh God actually got a lot stronger and I'm physically bigger my pumps are better my training is better everything's better

there's your answer if you think okay 10 was pretty good and I'm strong but I feel like I could be getting better pumps I feel like I could still milk some more growth out hey no worries in the next meso slowly trying to work out from 10 sets on average to 15 sets an effort don't just go back running to 20. that is a disaster it's almost like uh running back to like I said like an abusive relationship you're like he'll love me again Mr high volume no no no no no if high volume was

really nasty to you and it worked okay that if this lower volume works better Hey listen like start from here and work up slow if even you need to work up at all because remember more volume isn't better the right amount of volume is better the right amount for you how do you check if it's the right amount well is the training process resulting in really good rep PR's and really good feelings in the gym if it is you're on the right track there's not a magical reason to think like oh more will still be

better you know it's like if you go to a restaurant have a really good meal you're like oh oh this is great put up oh perfect and someone's like hey another serving of soup and you're like but I just had that super was amazing but I'm done they're like no no you want more soup yes more soup now and you're like this is crazy but people do that to themselves with volume you think wow in a great huge progression doing 12 sets of quads per week the biggest progression I've ever had I repeated that for

another month I got another big set of PRS should I go back to doing 18 why would you say that try 13 or 14 maybe and if the progression is a little worse go back to 12. that's how you got to read this it's all about Longview Auto regulation after many of such these phases you'll start to develop a pretty good idea pretty objectively about which volume averages give you the best meso to meso long-term performance gains for example you can have a situation in which 10 sets of chest work per week let's say on

average makes you have a very low fatigue environment but doesn't grow a ton of muscle growth some but not a ton so your first meso goes real well because you're fresh for the first time in your life but then second or third missiles after that they kind of Peter out you can have another situation where the high volume one where it's 20 cents per week and you're just slowly making gains but you're slogging along crazy fatigue bad pumps Etc if you realize 15 sets a week really just gets you the best results overall that's your

new home base that's where you discovered 10 is not enough 20s both are survivable these all of these are within your minimum effective to maximum recoverable window but there's parts of that window you can exploit better than other parts some is a little too little some is too much some is just right so break into that stupid house the bear had and the Bears had Goldilocks and you know what I'm saying I just get like a auto shotgun because if the Bears are in there you'll at least eat that I'm not saying kill the bears

but they're dangerous animals if they don't want to give up their soup shoot like the the kid Bear right in front of Mama Bear and she's like nah when the dad's like oh could you do this to our family you're like holy that fairy tales are up in any case don't just look at one mesocycle by itself you did a high volume phase then you did a low volume phase the low of your face went great you're like that's it that's it I'm a low volume guy are you though maybe all of the muscle you

gained came from the high volume phase and when the low fatigue of volume phase allowed you to show that muscle off that's what got you the big pumps that's what got you the big PR's another two mesos of low volume you could be like ah I'm not progressing much I got to this new level but I didn't progress much whereas if you had an intermediate volume between the ultra high and ultra low you could both have had an amazing first meso after the high volume thing and progressed progressed progressed so low volumes can seem like

winners because they don't produce a lot of fatigue and if you had a lot of fatigue they make you instantly much greater but they might not be the answer to long term because they just don't build much muscle looking at strings is the best taking all muscles all the volumes into consideration of future plans and at some point you may get to a situation where you've had great results you've altered the volume over many months since your last volume reset you're looking at it now and you're thinking I'm back to high volumes again because your

sensitivity will drop over time so it's natural to raise your volumes over time and you're saying I'm back in that place I was eight months ago where I think I'm doing too much hey guess what you do another volume reset just like we described it's going to wash you out you get a new Baseline and you go from there and because that volume reset gives you so much time to do low volume it's great for injury healing it's great for injury prevention it's great for long-term motivation because if you have times during the year where

you're really not training super hard it brings that fire back like crazy and then you go into another foray of starting with lower volumes and working your way up to a really great midpoint where you get your best results folks thanks for tuning in let me know if you have any questions below and we'll see you next time