Junk Volume: Why You Must Avoid It For Max Muscle

in the bodybuilding world junk volume refers to any training you do that takes up time and energy but has no actual benefit in terms of muscle or strength gain so it's basically exactly what it sounds like volume is the amount of work or simply the number of hard sets that you do and junk is garbage it's not actually worth anything and as we'll see i think the scientific evidence is pretty clear in showing that junk volume is a real phenomenon and i personally think it's holding many trainees back from getting the gains that they want

so let's take a look at the three most common types of junk volume and how we can avoid all three the first example we'll cover is excessive volume per workout so let's say you're training your chest with a flat dumbbell press after a quick warmup you'll do your first working set for eight to ten reps and it's a hard set within one or two reps of failure now because the muscle is being stretched and shortened under load with control it'll no doubt generate a high amount of mechanical tension within the pec so obviously this set

will be very effective at stimulating muscle growth and it falls under the umbrella of what we'd call effective volume it's definitely not junk volume and if instead of one set like this you did two sets both of those sets would be effective at stimulating growth and if you did three sets the third set would be effective as well but what if you did 10 sets would all 10 of those sets be equally effective at stimulating muscle growth would you expect to see 10 times the growth if you did 10 times the sets or would the

stimulus per set eventually diminish to the point that we might as well just call them wasted sets junk volume well i think it's obvious that your return per set will diminish but at what point does it become junk is it after three sets per body part 10 sets 20 sets how many sets in a single workout can we do before we're just wasting our time energy and ability to recover let's take a look at this comprehensive in-house meta analysis from james krieger which pulled the results of nine separate studies looking at the impact of adding

sets on hypertrophy as you can see in the graph here up to around six sets per muscle we see a pretty clear benefit in terms of muscle growth but once you go above six sets you hit a pretty hard plateau and maybe even regress a bit now i wanna be clear in previous videos i've talked about weekly volumes and i've said that roughly 10 to 20 sets per muscle per week is usually the sweet spot and i still think that's true however in this video i'm talking about volume per muscle per day how much volume

should you do in a single workout to maximize muscle growth so going back to our chest example sure you could do 10 12 14 sets for your chest in a single workout but those extra sets beyond six to eight probably aren't doing much to help grow your chest and at a certain point they could be counterproductive because now your chest is going to have a harder time recovering from all that volume now of course all six of those sets don't have to be on the same exercise so for example you could do three sets of

flat dumbbell press then three sets of incline cable flies but to then go and do another three sets of machine presses and then another three sets of push-ups some of those sets are most likely going to be falling into the junk territory for most people and if you feel like you really need that much chest volume in order to keep progressing you'd be better off either splitting those extra sets out into separate workouts or maybe you don't actually need as much volume as you think you do and you'd be better off keeping your volume the

same and instead focusing on other variables like your technique execution and effort per set now before we go any further i need to make a few important caveats first if you look at krieger's volume graph you'll notice that there's a lot of variance in the data this means that for any given volume there's a big range in terms of muscle growth for different studies in different individuals this line is simply reporting the average trend so on average most people won't get more gains out of doing more than six sets for a muscle in a single

workout but no doubt some of you watching this video have volume curves that look something more like this and you might not run into junk volume until you reach 10 or 12 sets possibly more so this trend line should be your starting place and then you'll want to adjust the numbers up or down as you assess your own progress and recovery i also think your volume needs depend on how much you train to failure if you push each and every set to absolute failure your volume cap will be lower so to be clear the six

set figure that i'm suggesting here assumes that you're not taking every set to true failure but you are getting pretty close so it means six hard working sets close to failure within a single muscle in a single workout if you're regularly going well above this you might not be pushing those sets as hard as you think you are or you might be wasting time and energy on junk volume i should also say that if you're doing less than six sets per muscle per workout that's perfectly fine as long as your total weekly volume is sufficient

so for example for the biceps you could do three to four sets of different curl variations on monday wednesday and friday and then that would add up to be ten effective weekly sets which is solid so six sets should be seen as an upper threshold per workout not a minimum threshold that you need to hit every time you train a muscle i also think these numbers differ depending on body part based on my coaching experience some body parts really do seem to tolerate and benefit more from higher volumes for example i think the back glutes

and quads usually grow better with more sets so i would speculate that the average per session effective volume might be closer to 10 to 12 sets for those muscles and closer to six to eight sets for everything else and this is part of the reason why i still think the traditional bro split will be sub-optimal for most people if you do 20 sets for your chest on your monday chest day at least half of that volume is pretty much junk for most people i'm not saying it's doing nothing but i really doubt it'll make a

noticeable difference on the other hand if you instead do 10 sets for your chest on monday's upper body day and then 10 sets for chest on thursday's upper body day suddenly you've cut down on your junk sets and i do think that approach would result in better progress now i should mention that the latest research does show that bro splits still work just fine as long as weekly volume is matched however i think that if you're trying to go from the intermediate to advanced stage or from the advanced to elite stage most people won't be

able to get there as efficiently on a bro split because to keep driving progress upward you're gonna need to bump your weekly volume up and if you try to stack all those extra sets on one day they just start to look more junky eventually at that point it just makes sense to distribute your sets more evenly throughout the week whether that be through an upper lower push-pull legs full body or some hybrid split alright the next type of junk volume that i want to look at is easy sets and i do think this is the

most common and most pernicious type of junk volume that there is at least in commercial gyms and with more casual lifters research shows that when people are left to their own devices most lifters don't train hard enough to maximize muscle growth past the newbie phase and the study people were asked to pick a weight they'd normally do for 10 reps on the bench press and then the researchers had them actually do it for as many reps as they possibly could only 22 percent of people got 10 to 12 reps which i'd argue is about where

you want to be to maximize muscle growth only 22 were actually there 31 got 13 to 15 reps so they'd be leaving about three to five reps in the tank not horrendously easy this will still build muscle but if this type of volume dominates your routine you might have a hard time getting past the beginner to early intermediate stage i personally wouldn't call this junk volume because it is still worth something especially if you're doing multiple sets however the 47 of people who got 16 to 20 plus reps with their typical 10 rep weight relieving

six to 10 or more reps in the tank and this is what i'd call junk volume and you'll never get past the intermediate stage training this way and so for practical purposes the majority of hypertrophy work should be within zero to three reps from failure and it'd be smart to take some of those sets all the way to failure whether you do that on the last set for each muscle like dr schoenfeld recommends or on the last week of a mesocycle like dr isratel recommends and the last type of junk volume that i want to

quickly mention is ultra high rep sets so anything upwards of 40 to 50 reps and similar to so-called easy sets it isn't that ultra high rep sets don't do anything they're just far from optimal research shows that you can train too light even if you go to failure and that cutoff seems to be somewhere in the range of 20 of your one rep max so if you're regularly doing sets in the range of 50 plus reps you'd be a lot better off simply increasing the weight and getting down below 30 reps or so apart from

this i think the biggest downside of ultra high rep work is that it creates a huge recovery demand for no added hypertrophic stimulus it can get you super sore and impair your performance for future workouts and end up compromising your results despite actually working harder now if you guys are interested i spoke with researcher james krieger about junk volume over on my podcast which i'll link down below i also just launched the final 10 week installment of my power building series which you can learn more about over on jeffnipper.com and before we go i want

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