The Old 'Go Hard or Go Home' Mentality
The traditional approach to building muscle and strength, popularised in bodybuilding circles, has long been built on a foundation of high training volume. The thinking was simple: to make a muscle grow, you had to subject it to a massive amount of work,
often involving dozens of sets per workout. This led to marathon gym sessions and the pervasive idea that unless you were leaving the gym completely exhausted, you weren't training hard enough. While this approach can work, it often leads to what experts call "junk volume"—extra sets performed with diminishing returns that contribute more to fatigue than to actual progress. This philosophy can be discouraging for people with busy lives who can't dedicate two hours a day to lifting weights.
Defining Training Volume
Before diving into the new findings, it's important to understand what “training volume” actually means. In simple terms, volume is the total amount of work you do. It's typically calculated as sets multiplied by reps multiplied by the weight lifted. However, for practical purposes, most researchers and coaches now track volume by simply counting the number of hard sets performed for a specific muscle group per week. A "hard set" is one that is taken close to muscular failure, where you can only complete a few more repetitions, if any, with good form. This distinction is crucial, as five easy, half-hearted sets are not equivalent to five challenging sets pushed with high effort.
What the New Science Says
Recent scientific analyses have provided a clearer picture of the relationship between volume and muscle growth, and the results are good news for the time-crunched. A growing body of evidence, including large-scale meta-analyses, confirms that there are diminishing returns with very high volumes. For muscle growth (hypertrophy), the sweet spot appears to be between 10 to 20 hard sets per muscle group per week. While even fewer sets can produce significant gains, progress tends to optimize within this range. Beyond 20 weekly sets, the added benefit becomes minimal, while the recovery cost and risk of overtraining increase substantially. One 2025 study even found that a group performing 12 sets per week gained more strength than groups with much higher volumes, suggesting that excessive volume can hamper recovery and, in turn, limit strength development.
It's About Quality, Not Just Quantity
The key takeaway from the latest research is the emphasis on effort and intensity over pure volume. A single, hard set taken close to failure provides a powerful stimulus for your muscles to adapt and grow stronger. This concept is often referred to as finding your "minimum effective dose"—the least amount of work needed to trigger a positive result. Instead of grinding through six sets of an exercise with mediocre intensity, you might achieve better results by performing just three sets with maximum focus and effort. This shift encourages lifters to prioritise making every set count. Focusing on progressive overload—gradually increasing the weight, reps, or difficulty over time—within a moderate volume range is a more sustainable and efficient driver of long-term strength gains than simply adding more and more sets.
Putting It Into Practice
So, how can you apply this to your own routine? First, stop thinking about how many sets you do per workout and start tracking your total sets per muscle group per week. Aim for that 10-20 set range for muscles you want to grow. For instance, if you want to build your chest, you could perform 4 sets of bench presses on Monday and 4 sets of dumbbell presses plus 3 sets of flyes on Thursday, for a total of 11 weekly sets. It's also more effective to spread this volume across two or more sessions per week rather than trying to cram it all into one marathon workout. This allows for better recovery and higher quality work in each session. Start at the lower end of the volume range (around 10-12 sets) and only increase it if your progress stalls. This methodical approach ensures you're doing enough to grow without accumulating unnecessary fatigue.
