Volume: How Many Sets Should You Do?

Volume is a key driver of muscle growth and strength gain. It is pretty easy to understand that the more work you do, the more results you get, up until a point. In resistance training, we generally measure training volume by virtue of the number of sets you perform. But there is actually quite a bit of nuance to this discussion.

However, to really dig into this topic, I am going to need to assume that you have already read our article on understanding reps, as this does cover a lot of stuff around reps that will allow you to better understand and utilise the information in this article. Our articles on RIR and RPE and tempo are also quite helpful in rounding out your knowledge of reps, and thus will allow you to better understand volume.

If you haven’t already, it would be incredibly helpful to also read our articles on why exercise is important, the goals of exercise, the types of exercise we have available to us, and to have a rough idea of the general exercise guidelines. It would also be helpful if you had a good understanding of why and how we use resistance training to build muscle and strength. I am also going to assume that if you intend to use this information to make better exercise programs, you have already spent some time thinking about your exercise selection and have ensured it is appropriate for your goals.

You can also visit our exercise hub for more content on exercise.

Before we get stuck in, I would just like to remind you that we offer comprehensive online coaching. So if you need help with your own exercise program or nutrition, don’t hesitate to reach out. If you are a coach (or aspiring coach) and want to learn how to coach nutrition, then consider signing up to our Nutrition Coach Certification course. We do also have an exercise program design course in the works, if you are a coach who wants to learn more about effective program design and how to coach it. We do have other courses available too.

Now, with all that out of the way, we can actually get stuck into the discussion of volume!

Sets (Volume)

Sets are pretty easy to understand, as they are just what a grouping of reps is called. So if you are doing 3 sets of 8 reps, you are going to do 8 reps, wait for a set time (we will discuss rest periods in a future article), do 8 reps, wait for a set time, and do a final 8 reps. There is not too much to be said here, in terms of understanding what a set actually is. However, the number of sets you perform does have implications for the results you get from training. 

So far in this article series, we have been discussing training from a very rep-centric point of view. However, it is very unlikely that performing a single set of reps is sufficient to elicit the adaptations desired, at least not for long. Nobody goes into a gym, does a single set of 8 reps, walks out, and thinks they are doing enough to get the results they want. Even the most ardent low-volume advocates usually do multiple warm-up sets, and usually multiple exercises for the same muscle group.

So if we are to better understand how to set up an effective training program, we need to understand how to decide on the number of sets of an exercise we are to perform and we need to know how many sets we are to program for an entire workout and then a larger training plan.

Why Multiple Sets

Now, the first question we need to ask is; “Why do we need to do multiple sets?” Why isn’t it sufficient to just do one set? The answer to this is actually quite straightforward. It actually is sufficient to do one set. Until you adapt to that. 

If someone has never been to a gym before or done any kind of training, getting them to do a single set is probably enough to elicit some adaptations. You often see this happen in beginners, where you get them to do a very low total amount of work, and yet, they still find they are incredibly sore with DOMS the next day. You see, it just required a low amount of total work to elicit adaptations, because their threshold for effects to occur is so low. Almost any kind of stimulus is enough to get them adapting, as they don’t have a large functional capacity, and thus even very low amounts of work is sufficient to signal the body that a significant stressor has occurred and it needs to adapt to it. 

When these individuals go to the gym the next time, they have adapted to that level of work, and they need more stimulus to see further adaptations. So what does this look like in reality? Well, they go to the gym the second time and if they do the same as last time, they won’t feel as sore the day after, and this will continue until they are not really doing enough to signal their muscles to adapt. They have to increase the stimulus required to signal adaptations (we will discuss progressive overload in a future article). 

We can do this by increasing the weight, and we can also do this by increasing the total number of sets we do at a given weight. After an individual has adapted beyond the very beginner stage, they will need to get close to failure multiple times during a workout and across a week to provide a sufficient signal. So there appears to be a lower threshold for the amount of sets required to even reach a point where the body is signalled to adapt.

This then raises another question, “should we just do more and more sets?” Surely if some is good, then more is better? You would be right, up to a point. There seems to be a critical drop off point for the total number of sets, where doing more doesn’t seem to elicit further adaptations (at least noticeable adaptations).

You get to a point where you are doing an amount of sets that is sufficient to trigger the adaptations, and where doing more doesn’t seem to provide any meaningful further benefit. If you do more than that, you may get slightly more results, however, you may actually be doing worse than if you were to do less, as you might be causing excess fatigue and muscle damage. Doing more may also simply not lead to better results, and potentially just leads to stagnation or even regression, as you aren’t able to recover enough between bouts of the stimulus. So there appears to be an upper threshold for both the amount you need to do during a given workout, for a training week and for a training program as a whole.

Ok, so there appears to be a range (which I will discuss more in a moment) for the number of sets we should perform, with an upper and a lower limit. However, we have to ask ourselves, is this even the right way to think about things? Should we be using the number of sets as a training variable?

Ultimately, it doesn’t really tell us a whole lot about the variable that is the key driver for growth, muscle tension! I don’t think anyone would say that 3 sets of a squat is the same as 3 sets of a quad extension is the same as 3 sets of sissy squats etc. They are all more or less challenging to the muscle of interest. So is counting the number of sets even all that important?

What is Volume

The total number of sets performed is just a proxy marker for the total amount of tension put on a muscle, and it doesn’t really account for how differently challenging different exercises are. However, it may actually be the most convenient and intuitive way to keep track of things.

When we discuss training, we often use the term “volume”, but that can be quite a confusing term as people often mean different things by it. Volume generally refers to the total amount of work done, either for a given exercise, muscle, workout, week of training or training block. But how do we define work?

Well, a number of methods have been proposed for this, and they all have utility in certain circumstances, however, they can often overcomplicate things without leading to better results. So, we generally advocate for the simplest method here (but understanding the others will allow you to look at things with more refinement when necessary). We can calculate the amount of volume we do by using a number of equations. These can all generally be applied to work out the total volume done for a given muscle group, a given workout, a given program and a block of training. Let’s discuss each.

We can use the formula reps x sets x load to calculate the amount of work being done. This method (often called “volume load”) takes account of the weight being used, which is quite valuable, as it allows you to see the difference between different exercises based on how heavy they can be loaded. This is really handy, as it allows you to account for stuff like I discussed previously, where you are trying to account for the differences between a squat and a quad extension. By including the load that is lifted, you can see how much each exercise contributes to the overall volume. 

Now, the flip side of this is that you can be left prioritising exercises that aren’t actually in line with your goals, if you focus too much on the volume load. For example, you can almost certainly leg press more than you can squat. So if we use volume load, we may prioritise the leg press rather than the squat, and thus we may miss out on some of the benefits the squat has to offer. 

The use of volume load also leads to the prioritisation of multi-joint, multi-muscle, “compound” movements over single joint, “isolation” movements. That isn’t necessarily a huge issue, however, it may not actually lead to better results, especially if hypertrophy is the goal. A quad extension may be more effective for building your quads than something like a squat, especially if the way you squat doesn’t adequately challenge your quads. So it is probably more beneficial to use volume load to track progress on a specific exercise over time, rather than to use it to make exercise selection choices.

Ok, so what if we just drop the load part of the equation? What if we just used reps x sets? Well, that does have some benefits and drawbacks. It removes the possibility of making exercise choices based purely on the amount of load that can be lifted, but it does also remove any indication about the effectiveness of those reps. At least with including load, you are somewhat pushed towards focusing on progressive overload and trying to maximise the load lifted, but if we remove that from the equation, there is no rationale for choosing exercises that use greater loads. We could just have someone do all single joint, isolation work and call it all good.

While there is nothing necessarily wrong with doing a lot of isolation work, I don’t think anyone would suggest that two programs are equally effective or demanding, despite both being equated on the basis of reps x sets, if one was all compound lifts and the other was all isolation work. 

This method also potentially biases you to focus more on higher volume training, rather than effective training. You could use a very light weight and get lots of reps, and lots of sets, while staying away from failure, and if we calculated your reps x sets, it would be quite high. However, those reps wouldn’t have led to better training outcomes or results, because they were too low to maximise motor unit recruitment and they weren’t close enough to failure to sufficiently tax the muscles either. 

Conversely, you could be doing very effective training with something like 6 sets of 5 reps of squats, but feel like you aren’t doing enough, because that only gives you a total of 30 (6 x 5 = 30) and your friend is doing 10 sets of 10 reps of leg press (10 x 10 = 100). However, that simply doesn’t mean your results are going to be worse than your friends, and using reps x sets to compare two programs doesn’t really tell us the whole picture, and it certainly doesn’t tell us what the results from two programs will be like (using volume load also wouldn’t necessarily help us compare these two programs). It doesn’t mean that using reps x sets is bad, not at all, but it may not be perfect in every situation.

To solve some of the issues, we could use effective reps x sets, with effective reps being the reps within ~5 of failure. As we have discussed previously when discussing how close to failure you should be, the last couple of reps are likely the most effective. That doesn’t mean we need to go to failure, but it does mean we need to approach it.

So if we are using something like reps in reserve (RIR) we can basically use 5 minus our RIR as the figure as our input for “effective reps”. So if you are doing something like 2 RIR for 8 sets, you end up with 24 effective reps (5 – 2 = 3 effective reps, and then we can use that for… 3 x 8 = 24). This has many advantages, as it ensures that the work you are tracking is the work that is actually likely to be the work that leads to the desired results. 

However, the drawback is you have to be able to accurately use RIR. It does also potentially bias you towards using “easier” exercises, because 2 RIR on a hamstring curl is much different than a 2 RIR deadlift, and if we are only really accounting for the RIR reps then you are more likely to choose easier exercises. This is also compounded by the fact that very frequently, easier, isolation style work will just be set as 0-2 RIR, while the heavier, compound work will usually be set to 3-2 RIR. So you end up disproportionately biasing the “easier” work as being the effective work.

Finally, the easiest way to account for the amount of volume is to just count the number of “hard sets” performed. By hard sets, I mean sets that were somewhere within the 5 RIR range. This gives a more equal bias towards the heavy, compound lifts and the isolation lifts, as they are both counted as equal.

Of course, you can still game this method by just doing isolation work, and thus racking up more “hard sets”, but at least you don’t have to do any major calculations outside of just counting the number of sets that were within 5 reps of failure.

Counting hard sets seems a bit less scientific than the other methods that involve more calculations, but ultimately, they all have their pros and cons and we are really just trying to get an idea of how much stress is being applied to the system.

So, with that out of the way, how many sets should you be programming?

How Many Sets

The number of sets that you should perform is completely goal dependent and must pay respect to the total volume you have been doing over the last number of weeks, months and even years. This is why you will see advocates of one set methods and advocates of multiple set methods. They all potentially have a place in the training program. 

However, it must be noted that it is easier to create more mechanical tension, and induce more muscle damage and metabolic stress with multiple sets. The number of sets we do is also going to depend on what exactly we are trying to achieve, whether it is muscle gain, strength gain or even more endurance adaptations. 

It should also respect what else is going on in your life, as periods of high stress and/or low sleep may reduce your ability to adapt to the training stimulus (thus lowering the higher threshold). You must also take into account what is going on with your nutrition, as your capacity for volume is likely to be increased when in a surplus and decreased when in a deficit. 

At certain stages, we may actually be programming to just maintain certain adaptations rather than progress (for example, an in-season field athlete just trying to maintain muscle mass and strength). 

We must also account for the fact that fatigue accumulates over time, and thus just because the first week or two of a program went well, that doesn’t mean that it won’t be too much volume in future weeks, as the fatigue accumulates. It is better to think of effective volume as a moving target, as it is more likely it is a moving range than a single number. However, we need some sort of working targets or we can’t design a program.

Multiple sets generally lead to greater rates of muscle and strength gain, as muscle/strength gains are subject to a dose-response curve. More sets generally create more adaptations, and thus more muscle/strength. However, there is a point of diminishing returns with the number of sets that can be performed. Doing more after this point will only hamper your recovery and won’t allow you to make the adaptations you are training for.

A lower number of sets can be a great tool to employ when you are trying to maintain a strength quality while you focus on something else, but multiple sets will nearly always be better for eliciting greater gains in muscle and strength. This is because you generally need a lower number of sets to actually maintain and even build strength compared to building muscle. 

The total training volume must be taken into consideration when deciding how many sets to perform. As a general rule, the more reps performed, the fewer sets performed (assuming equal RIR/RPE). When training with higher repetitions such as 6-15, fewer sets need to be performed. However, when training with lower repetitions such as 1-5, more sets should be performed. This goes back to our discussion of effective reps, and we can simply get more effective reps when using higher rep ranges (although this isn’t necessarily true as you get beyond say 15+ reps).

However, this gets slightly muddied when these sets are taken closer to failure. Doing a 1 rep max and trying to replicate this for multiple sets, simply isn’t going to happen. But this is just another reason you shouldn’t necessarily be testing your strength when you go to the gym, you should instead be building it. Leaving a few reps in the tank will allow you to accumulate the volume needed to progress.

This brings me to another very important point. To prevent “overtraining”, especially when in a calorie deficit, we should cut back on the number of sets performed first. So if you were doing 5 reps by 5 sets, perhaps you would do 5 reps by 4 sets. The intensity stays high but the overall volume is lowered.

Your body is very well equipped to prevent overtraining by intensity (you simply won’t be able to lift the weight), but overtraining with volume is quite possible. Unless you are consistently getting stronger week to week (or month to month), something needs to change.

More sets generally enhance neural adaptations, the more you do an exercise at a given intensity the more the body will feel comfortable performing this exercise at a given intensity. This is the law of repeated effort. The more sets performed will mean that a lower number of total exercises need to be performed. More time under tension will also call for a lower number of total sets (even if just from a practical standpoint of not being in the gym all day). As a result, we should generally focus on exercises that offer us more bang for our buck. 

As an added benefit to a higher number of sets, the hormonal response is greater than with a lower set method. Greater levels of anabolic hormones are seen during recovery from multiple set methods, which potentially leads to greater adaptations and a better physiological response to training. I certainly wouldn’t be using some transient hormonal changes to dictate my overall training paradigm, but it is something of note.

While I would love to give you a specific number of total reps to perform per week, or the number of sets to get you there, it is a very tricky question to answer. You obviously have to refer back to the rep range used, the overall goal of the training program, and the unique recovery capacity of the individual.

There are no real set rules, although generally speaking, intensity is inversely related to volume, both on the reps side of things and the sets. Doing more reps, means total sets go down, while doing lower reps means sets go up. However, even this rule gets a little bit muddy as you start going below ~5 reps. It gets even muddier when you try to decipher whether this applies to muscle groups or movements (more on this in a moment), and due to the varied nature of muscles, exercises and individuals, it is an impossible question to give a perfect generalised answer to.

However, given that most people will be working mainly in the 6-12 rep range, somewhere in the range of 4-8 sets per muscle group per workout, and 10-20 sets per week seems to produce results consistently for both strength and muscle. You may be able to get away with more and you may be able to get away with less, but this is a good starting point. 

Obviously, you must factor in what phase of training you are in, what the goal is, how big the muscle is, what other muscles are targeted, the range of motion of the exercise, and a whole host of other factors. But 10-20 sets per week, with 4-8 sets per muscle per workout seems to work well for most.

There likely is a lower limit to the number of sets per workout, as doing a low number of sets in a workout is unlikely to be sufficiently stimulating. It appears that 2-3 sets for a muscle group per workout is the lower limit.

Now, this doesn’t mean we should always equally allocate this volume across all body parts, or across the week. We may want to prioritise certain muscles or muscle groups, while only wanting to maintain other muscles or muscle groups. For example, you may want to focus more on your chest, while your quads are big enough. So you may do 20 sets for your chest, while only allocating 10 sets for your quads. 

Now, this naturally brings up another question, “Is there a total number of sets for the entire body across the week, or is it just muscle specific?”, or in the way that most people generally ask that question, “Can I just do 20 sets for all body parts and get faster results?” Unfortunately, there does seem to be a point where the systemic overload on the body is too much to recover from, and thus we can’t just use muscle specific recommendations in isolation.

There is usually a high degree of overlap between muscles when performing various exercises (for example, while you may be counting a bench press as chest volume, it is also taxing your shoulders, triceps, biceps and lats (among many other muscles, especially the core muscles)), so it becomes quite difficult to really count this (we will discuss this more in a moment). 

Confounding this is the fact that some exercises are just way more fatiguing than others, both muscularly and neurologically. For example, a deadlift is very challenging, both muscularly and neurologically, and it is very difficult to neatly assign it to a specific muscle group’s volume allocation and then also account for how fatiguing it is (and thus how much it takes away from your ability to allocate volume elsewhere). So there really is quite a lot to consider.

But, I don’t want you to go away without something to work with, so as a very rough rule of thumb, somewhere in the range of 60-120 sets per week total, probably makes sense for most. This will obviously be different depending on the exact goal, and what else the individual has going on, but that is a very rough and ready rule. It is quite a large bracket, but it does seem to be roughly the place where most programs fall within. 

• I should note that when we talk about volume, all the sets written on training programs generally do not include any warm-up sets required before the actual working sets. You will generally perform 1-5 warm-up sets depending on how heavy you will be going on each exercise. In other words, only working sets (“hard sets”) should be counted, because I hope you are getting nowhere even near failure during your warmup sets.

So, in general, we want to perform between 10-20 sets for a given body part (there is some overlap, so some muscles may be lower such as arms which get trained effectively with chest, back and shoulder training) and try to stay within the range of 60-120 sets per week total. This seems to be the sweet spot for most people. 

Allocating Volume Across All Muscle Groups 

For most people, we would generally design workouts that have a fairly even spread of volume (number of sets) across all the major muscles. However, once you have a better idea of how your body responds and you know where needs more or less focus, you can start really tailoring the volume to your unique needs. 

If you have lagging body parts, we may increase the volume for those muscles, while we may put other muscles on a lower volume approach. Now, you may be asking, “Why can’t we just focus on the most volume for all muscles at once?”, as you may think that would lead to faster overall growth. However, you only have a finite amount of recovery capabilities.

If everything is at the maximum recoverable level of volume, you will likely notice you are always sore, your joints will likely begin to hurt and most likely, you simply won’t see the results that you desire. You may even end up doing less overall volume, as fatigue gets so high that you simply aren’t able to lift to your full capacity and injuries start to creep in. So you want to look at the total volume done, compare that to how you are recovering, and slowly work to refine your approach.

There are a number of reasons why it is important to allocate volume across the major body parts, rather than just a few muscles you want to develop. While you will very frequently see people on social media who only ever seem to train certain muscle groups, this is generally not the best way to train. 

It can become incredibly tempting to focus solely on the muscles that you want to develop the most, and simply neglect the muscles that you don’t perceive to be as important. However, what we need to acknowledge is that humans did not evolve for purely aesthetic purposes. 

We evolved to move, not in isolation, but as dynamic systems, with each joint depending on not one, but a variety of muscles in order to function optimally. When we move, or perform a specific exercise, there is very rarely just one muscle working, but rather, there are muscles pulling on different ends of a joint to produce that specific movement. 

If we consider the shoulder, it moves in all directions, therefore the amount of different forces acting to produce or support any specific movement needs to be coordinated. If certain muscles aren’t doing their job, then other muscles have to do more work, or the “weak” muscles may simply become overloaded. While this shift in load isn’t inherently “bad” in the short term, there is a hypothetical risk of overuse injury depending on the joint, muscles, and movements in question. 

Unfortunately, most people tend to not appreciate the importance of injury prevention very often. Most people tend to think of the pain that would result from injury, but rarely acknowledge the negative impact that could result on our body composition and performance. If you cannot train your favourite muscle group for 6 months while engaging in rehabilitation, you could lose a significant amount of the muscle and strength you worked so hard for. Therefore, spending the time working on weaknesses now rather than retrospectively will be worth it long term, I assure you.

So when we are designing a training program, we are always trying to keep the whole body in mind, and while we may be focusing on targeting a specific muscle group, we need to keep the bigger picture in mind. It helps to keep an overall view to the allocation of volume in a workout, as this allows you to get a better idea of how balanced a program is. 

For example, if we look at a program that has 30 total sets per week assigned to pushing exercises, but only 10 sets for pulling exercises, we can assume that this program is biased towards developing those pushing muscles. This isn’t a bad thing, and it may be exactly what this individual needs/wants, but we have to look longer term too.

Is this program going to lead to the balanced development of a physique? Probably not. It will likely lead to the pressing muscles developing more than the pulling muscle. This can be a good thing, if the pulling muscles are overly developed relative to the pressing muscles, but this is rarely the case. 

Most people will allocate far more volume to the “beach” or “mirror” muscles (the muscles they can see, or are thought to be more desired), rather than work on the muscles of the body more evenly. It should be the starting point to relatively evenly distribute volume to all body parts (or major body movements as outlined above), and then more specific protocols can be developed to bring up weaker body parts. Most programs you will find online take the opposite approach, usually allocating more volume to the beach/mirror muscles, rather than evenly distributing volume. 

This is especially evident in programs that are sex-specifically targeted. Programs for men will tend to have a low volume of work for the legs, and much more volume allocated to the pressing muscles (chest and shoulders) and biceps, with a peripheral thought towards training the back. Conversely, programs targeted at women will often have an excessive emphasis on the glutes and lower body, with very little focus on the upper body.

So when you are designing a program, you should start with a more even allocation of volume. It doesn’t have to be perfectly balanced, but the assumption at the start should almost always be that we are focusing on building the whole body relatively evenly. 

Frequency

The discussion of volume must also pay respect to the frequency of exposure. Doing 20 sets for the quads once per week, versus 20 sets spread across 2 sessions, versus spread across 3 sessions, and so on, are all different stimuli. When we talk about frequency, we are generally referring to the frequency at which you train a specific body part (or movement or exercise), as opposed to how many times you train per week.

This has been a popular topic of discussion in the strength & conditioning community in recent years, since the research has challenged the practices of lots of bodybuilders, who tended to train a muscle only once per week. While this is a fine approach, it seems that training more frequently can allow for greater muscle and strength gains.

This seems to be clearer for strength than it is for muscle growth, but the good news is that even if you do train a muscle group 3 times per week, there is certainly no detriment to that, and potential benefits. However, like anything, this can be taken too far. The benefit of a higher frequency approach is likely to be more pronounced when comparing 1 vs 2 times per week than when comparing 4 vs 6, so there is no need to train every body part daily.

It seems to be the case that after a certain number of sets in a given workout, the maximal stimulus for adaptation is reached for that time period, and performing more than that doesn’t generally tend to induce more results and only potentially reduces recovery and/or performance. So doing a lot of volume on a single session, likely doesn’t represent best practice. 

Additionally, if we train a muscle only once per week, that muscle is likely recovered within 1-3 days, and thus waiting a week until you next train that muscle, just leaves the muscle in a longer state of under-stimulation. So it probably makes sense to spread your volume out between at least 2 sessions per week, as that will allow you to keep the muscle in a state of progression more often.

Of course, there is likely a point of diminishing returns here, where performing a session more frequently isn’t producing better results, or it drives each session below the threshold for sufficient stimulation (assuming overall volume is standardised). 

Some people use a higher frequency of exposure to allow for higher volumes of training to be performed, which is certainly one option. If you notice that higher volumes are progressing a muscle quicker, but you know that after a certain number of sets in a workout your performance drops off (let’s say 10 total sets for a muscle seems to be working really well for you, but after that, your performance drops off), well, you could firstly spread the volume out across the week (let’s say 2 workouts of 5 sets). Once you get the benefits of that, you can start building the volume up between those two workouts (i.e. bringing both workouts up to 6 sets, then 7 and so on).

One of the really nice effects that training with a higher frequency can have is that it gives you more practice with each exercise. For example, if you are trying to build a stronger squat, it’s not just about the size and strength of your muscles, but also how skilful you are at performing the exercise. Hence, when we train the squat more times per week, we get to refine that skill more often, even if it is with a different squat variation (which will still carry over to some extent). This is very important for beginners who need to spend time developing the skill of lifting.

In general, higher frequency tends to preserve the “quality” of your work better. Long workouts tend to become less effective toward the end of the session when you are fatigued, motivation is low, and you are just ready to be done, and some research suggests that performing too many sets (somewhere in the region of more than 8-10 sets in a given workout) for one body part in a single workout can compromise your progress (versus splitting it up). Therefore, when your total volume is spread out across the week and you have less volume per session, you can get higher quality work done at each session. For these reasons, you will rarely see more than 8-12 sets per body part (or similar exercise variation) per session in many good programs (even for advanced trainees), as they would rather see you spread any more than that out across the week.

Now, we are starting to build a picture of what a program might look like. To jog your memory, we know that we probably want >10 sets per muscle per week (for someone with a hypertrophy goal at least), although less may be fine for beginners with little to no training history and you may be able to maintain your results and perhaps make some progress with less. We also know that spreading this across ~2 sessions per week is probably a good idea. And, finally, we know that the broad repetition range of 6-15 is probably where most of our training will be, so that might mean doing 6-8 reps on one day and 10-15 on the other, with a little sprinkle of 1-5 and 20+ every now and then. Hopefully, these principles are starting to piece together for you, but the puzzle isn’t complete just yet!

In the next article in this series, we need to discuss rest periods, as these also inform our resistance training programming choices.

Volume Conclusion

Training volume is incredibly important to understanding how to use resistance training to get results in strength and hypertrophy. There are some subtle nuances to the discussion, but overall, it isn’t too complicated to understand. In general, the following guidelines make sense for most people (assuming you work in the 6-12 rep range):

As with everything, there is always more to learn, and we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface with all this stuff. However, if you are interested in staying up to date with all our content, we recommend subscribing to our newsletter and bookmarking our free content page. We do have a lot of content on how to design your own exercise program on our exercise hub.

If you would like more help with your training (or nutrition), we do also have online coaching spaces available.

We also recommend reading our foundational nutrition article, along with our foundational articles on sleep and stress management, if you really want to learn more about how to optimise your lifestyle. If you want even more free information on exercise, you can follow us on Instagram, YouTube or listen to the podcast, where we discuss all the little intricacies of exercise.

Finally, if you want to learn how to coach nutrition, then consider our Nutrition Coach Certification course. We do also have an exercise program design course in the works, if you are a coach who wants to learn more about effective program design and how to coach it. We do have other courses available too. If you don’t understand something, or you just need clarification, you can always reach out to us on Instagram or via email.

The previous article in this series is about Rep Tempo and Time Under Tension and the next article in this series is about Rest Periods, if you are interested in continuing to learn about exercise program design. You can also go to our exercise hub to find more exercise content.

Paddy Farrell

www.triagemethod.com

Hey, I'm Paddy!

I am a coach who loves to help people master their health and fitness. I am a personal trainer, strength and conditioning coach, and I have a degree in Biochemistry and Biomolecular Science. I have been coaching people for over 10 years now.

When I grew up, you couldn't find great health and fitness information, and you still can't really. So my content aims to solve that!

I enjoy training in the gym, doing martial arts and hiking in the mountains (around Europe, mainly). I am also an avid reader of history, politics and science. When I am not in the mountains, exercising or reading, you will likely find me in a museum.