How Many Sets Should I Do?

Dr. Wolf and Dr. Pak break down what the research actually says about how much training you need to build muscle.

References:

PMID: 41343037
PMID: 40249908
PMID: 20847704
Pre-print: Is There Too Much of a Good Thing? Meta-Regressions of the Effect of Per-Session Volume on Hypertrophy and Strength
PMID: 34527944
PMID: 31868813

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Muscle Lab Podcast, your new home for evidence-based fitness. I'm here with my co-host, Dr. Milo Wolf, real doctor, and today we have an amazing episode for you about training volume. Essentially everything you need to know about training volume.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Before we get into it, a brief word about what this podcast is going to be. In the muscle lab, we'll be discussing new studies that come out, but also evergreen takes on things like training volume, excess selection, rep angels, anything pertaining to building muscle, gaining strength, getting leaner.

SPEAKER_00 0:33

Indeed. Sharing not only the evidence, the scientific evidence, and looking at the deep evidence or studies or whatever I'm trying to say here, but also giving you our takes as coaches and as people who are in the trenches, both as coaches and as lifters, and helping you with practical takeaways for your lifting. Before we start though, this is a podcast brought to you by MyAdapt, our app. And because we will be talking about training volume today, this is something that we've thought about considerably when it comes to the development of the app and how the app works.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Yeah, so I'll take over here a little bit. We have based it directly on some of the studies we will talk about in this video. And whenever MyAdapt coaches you, it'll make sure that you're actually doing the sufficient number of sets given your goal. If you're trying to specialize on a muscle, it'll make sure you're doing the exact number of sets you need to maximize muscle growth. But if a muscle isn't as important to you, it'll make sure that you're doing enough volume overall to maintain muscle size. So if you want to have all this handled for you, check out myadapt at myadapt.com and you can use code muscle lab to get two weeks for free.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

Hey. Awesome. Well, let's get into it though. What is training volume? For those of you that may remember back in the day, training volume was defined as tonnage. Essentially, reps times weight times sets or sets times reps times weight. What was the the common one you used?

SPEAKER_01 1:58

Uh sets times reps times weight, and sometimes people would even add in distance so that you could calculate work done. Yeah. You know, force times distance equals work. All that to say definitions varied, but the fundamental one was sets times reps times weight was volume, or sometimes referred to as volume mode.

SPEAKER_00 2:14

Indeed. And what you got out of that was tonnage, uh usually measured in kilos, uh, a number that sounded very scientific and promised to give you a lot of insight, but in reality that's quite problematic.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

Yeah, and that's interesting you mentioned that, because a lot of workout apps out there, I'm not trying to throw shade here, do focus on this as a metric of something. That's true. Even tracking apps as well. Exactly. When in reality, volume load doesn't tell you a whole lot. If you're doing leg press, for example, your volume load can be off the charts simply because leg press involves a lot of weight being lifted. Whereas the same movement pattern, you know, knee extension with hip extension, something like a squat or a lunge, you might be using half the weight and get half the volume load as a result. But that doesn't mean you're actually seeing less muscle growth. So oftentimes focusing on volume mode doesn't really help you build muscle, and I think many people focus on it or focused on it, hopefully, wrongfully.

SPEAKER_00 3:09

Exactly. And just the number itself, unless I know your training really well, doesn't really tell me much about whether a session was productive or not. You could have lots of uh you could have a very high number, but that doesn't necessarily mean that those sets were taken to failure. So a simple way to measure volume is measuring hard sets. Essentially sets that are close enough to failure that we regard them as very effective for hypertrophy. And more recently, we've heard of the term fractional sets. A term that has upset some people for some reason, um, but is arguably a better way, at least based on the current evidence of quantifying training volume. When it comes to fractional sets, as the title implies, we're essentially counting not just direct sets. So if we say, okay, we're gonna do 10 sets for our biceps, we won't only count the bicep curls and the Bayesian curls and whatever, but also back work or other exercises that will involve our biceps, and we count those sets as half sets for that muscle. Is that half set though, truly half a set?

SPEAKER_01 4:13

Well, the truth is that we simply don't know. Because all of these assumptions about it being half a set, or you know, a bench press counting as a full set for your chest, but only half a set for your triceps. It could very well be the opposite. It could very well be actually your triceps are getting a full set's worth of stimulus, quote unquote. But the reality is that we have too few studies looking at hypertrophy from individual exercises to really tell. But when comparing simply counting sets directly, so one exercise counts for one muscle. So for example, pull downs only count for your back and do nothing for your biceps, to counting sets indirectly as well. So saying that pull downs actually count as a full set for your biceps, for your rear delts, for your forearms, all the secondary muscle groups involved, to a fractional model, which involve you know includes the assumption of saying half a set for the more secondary muscle groups, the fractional model was most accurate at explaining the data we have available. So when comparing those three models, the truth is likely somewhere in the middle. It's not one set for all muscle groups involved, even if they're very secondary, but it's also not no stimulus. It's probably somewhere in the middle. And that's like the way the fractional model, which counted as half a set for secondary muscle groups, came out ahead.

SPEAKER_00 5:23

What about the argument that, oh, if I do a set for my back and then go do bicep curls, I'm able to still do bicep curls and perform well. Therefore, it's not possible that my biceps went close to failure. So how can I count that as half a set?

SPEAKER_01 5:40

Well, I do think there's something to the idea that you can predict whether an exercise targeted a muscle by how much of a performance drop-off you see in a subsequent isolation exercise. But let's say, for example, you did a set of squats, and after that set of squats, you go to leg extensions, you try and lift your usual weight, and you get half the reps. That's a good sign your quads actually did something during the squat. But whether or not you can use that as a good metric to tell how effective an exercise is for that muscle, I don't think so. Because like I could do a bunch of tricep kickbacks, for example, which we know on various grounds probably aren't ideal for hypertrophy. And if I then went to do another tricep exercise, yeah, my triceps wouldn't perform as well. But the reality is, as far as hypertrophy goes, fatigue and hypertrophy stimulus are not the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 6:22

Nice. And we'll get into that in one of the next episodes that we'll do on training to failure and proximity to failure and how that relates to muscle growth. But let's get back to training volume. We're not going to dive into the details of hypertrophy mechanisms, aka stimuli, as we currently know. We have a big puzzle with a lot of pieces missing. We know that mechanical tension seems to be one of the primary stimuli for muscle growth, and that's where we can potentially infer the training volume.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

So we can potentially assume that training volume plays a role, given that training volume in disguise is really just saying how much tension are you applying?

SPEAKER_00 7:02

Thank you very much. My English there was uh escape the room. Um obviously, when it comes to strength, things are slightly different in terms of mechanisms. There's other factors at play, uh neurological efficiency, leverages, uh tendons, etc. etc. Um, but let's look at some of the applied evidence. Because one thing that we constantly yap about online and will be yapping about here as well is when it comes to mechanisms. Sure, if we knew exactly, if we knew if we knew the exact mechanism behind everything with 100% certainty, focusing on mechanisms would make more sense. But at the moment, because we have this scattered image of why things are happening, focusing on applied evidence is our best bet on getting closer to the truth and informing our training as lifters. Because at the end of the day, I want to get bigger and stronger, and I care about what the evidence shows as it pertains to that.

SPEAKER_01 7:54

Yeah, 100% agree. So why don't we go into the applied studies now?

SPEAKER_00 7:58

Indeed. And we have been blessed after years of pestering Palindatown. If you saw the WhatsApp group chat, you'd know we were asking for this meta-analysislash series of meta-regression for years. The most up-to-date meta on training volume after the the one before that was the Basval one, and before that, the infamous 2017 Schoenfeld one. Very quick recap. Back in the day, we saw that there's a dose-response relationship between volume and hypertrophy. The more you do, the more muscle growth you get. But in the last few years, there's been many more studies, and we've also had studies with much higher volumes than we had ever seen before. So, Palin and Dal, 67 studies, over 2,000 participants. And anything specific that stuck out to you when it came to the methods?

SPEAKER_01 8:49

Yeah, before I mention the methods, I just want to emphasize something you said. Back in that like show and felt method analysis from 2017, the volume wars have been raging on for a long time. Indeed. People saying that low volume is best, you know, high-intensity training, or that high volume is best. And the reality is that up until I would say a few years ago, things the research wasn't really in a state where it could tell you with certainty, or with much certainty at least, whether one approach was better than the other. And that's because even in the Schoenfeld analysis back in 2017, only nine years ago, the best data we had basically said doing more than 10 sets per week per muscle was better for hypertrophy than fewer than 10 sets. Yeah. But we didn't really have many studies on doing more than 10 sets per week per muscle. And so that's all we could really say. Then with the Bas Valement analysis in 2022, we finally had enough research to compare 12 to 20 sets per muscle per week to 20 plus sets per muscle per week. And at that point, some of the analysis did find a benefit doing over 20 sets. But even then, like that's not really the highest volume people train with. Like if you look at routines by Arnold back in the day, or Ronnie, or any number of bodybuilders, both natural and steroid using, they often trained with higher volumes than was researched in practice. And oftentimes, you know, they train six days a week, two hours a day, etc., but very high volumes. So even 20 plus sets doesn't really go far enough to really encompass what people do in practice. So now this PadMet analysis, the thing that stuck out to me is that one, they took a continuous approach, meaning instead of kind of saying, okay, high volume versus low volume, people don't really want to know about that. What they really want to know is how many sets should I be doing. And so in a categorical analysis, we're comparing high versus moderate versus low volume, you might be assigning certain numbers to the descriptors, right? You might be saying high volume is over 20 sets, moderate volumes is 12 to 20 sets, and low volumes is below 12 sets per week for muscle. Nevertheless, what we really want to know is how many sets should I be doing per muscle per week? Not should I be doing high volume by some definition, some researchers made up, or low volume. And so they actually performed a meta-regression where they tried to see as the number of sets went up, how did hypertrophy change? So yeah, I think it was the first methodologically robust meta-analysis on the topic, given the number of studies involved, and the analysis approach. It's kind of asking the right question. We're looking at a continuous variable, a variable that kind of scales up, like one, two, three, four, five sets. So why are we asking a binary question of high versus low boying? 100%. That's what kind of stuck out to me.

SPEAKER_00 11:24

Shout out to Pelon Natal, and it's cool to see, and this is something you're potentially getting into, um, more appropriate statistical approaches are being worked in. Because obviously, it's not like the authors in the past were like, no, we were gonna approach this in a wrong or worse way. It's that, you know, in the field of sports science, stats not um expertise that many of us have. So the other cool thing was that um in order to they separated essentially volume by by tiers uh of efficiency and looked at how much more volume was needed in order to detect um a change in muscle hypertrophy that we were able to statistically be confident in that was actually there, um, which was really cool. They also did that for strength. We will mention strength uh in this episode as well, but we're not gonna focus too much uh too much on it because it's 2026. It's the muscle lab, not the strength lab, is it? It's over, guys. Unfortunately, 2014 was fun, powerlifting was cool, but it's over. Just kidding, powerlifting is great. All right, um, let's get to some of the results. Um actually, before we do that, they also controlled for things like intervention duration, training status, uh, and frequency. So they also looked at the effect of those, and um, that was something cool to see and obviously informs our practice. But starting with the big MED, the minimum effective dose. What was found here, and this is a number you hear often from my mouth, and you may also read in my book, TransparentNonLonger.com. You can pre-order it now. Um, four fractional sets per muscle group per week was the threshold for producing uh reliably detectable hypertrophy in about 10 weeks. How do you feel about that?

SPEAKER_01 13:10

I'm like honestly, I feel pretty good. I think these are very cool findings. I think for anyone who's short on time, like busy, doesn't have that much time to train, four fractional sets per week per muscle is really low. Like we're talking for your triceps, you might do two sets of benching in a week, two sets of overhead pressing in a week, and then two sets of tricep pushdowns. And with that, you've reached four fractional sets. You've got one set from those two sets of bench press, one set from those two sets of over pressing, and another two direct sets from pushdowns. That is super easy to reach, and that genuinely could be achieved in two half an hour workouts a week, maybe even less than that, even less than most of the major muscle groups in your body, which is really cool because that means that people who just want to build some muscle consistently, but don't have that much time, they have stressful lives, actual jobs, actual friends, etc., they can still make it happen.

SPEAKER_00 13:58

True. Still buy the book. There's uh more than just that, it's not one page of that. Um totally. Um, if you then add six more sets, fractional sets, and you go to the five to ten set range, fractional set range, that's the higher efficiency, as they called it in the paper range, where essentially with adding six more sets, you get even more hypertrophy. And then we start slowly, not just yet entering big diminishing returns, but then we have the 11 to 18 sets range, where you need another 8.5 sets in order to again see detectable hypertrophy. 19 to 29 sets means you need another roughly 11 sets to still see gains, but you know, diminishing returns are kicking in, and then we have the lowest efficiency tier, the 30 to 42 sets, which they've called it that because they want to keep the gains from you. Because that's the range. Ignore everything else we said. 30 to 42 sets. Thank you for listening, Milo. Uh, anything you want to see the people out with?

SPEAKER_01 15:00

All I can read in these notes is no clear plateau. So I would say 30 to 42 is really just a starting point. That's true. Keep pushing, pushing on. Science hasn't yet studied what we're doing here. If you're not over training, you're under training. It's true. I mean, by definition. That's true. What I would say, if you're confused with these numbers, it's a very easy, albeit slightly inaccurate, rule thumb. Uh-huh. Every time you double volume, you might be getting roughly 50% more relative growth. So let's say you go from 10 sets a week for your chest to 20 sets a week for your chest. And let's say you were going to gain a pound of muscle on your pecs in a year by doing 10 sets, which is a lot, obviously. By doing 20 sets a week instead for that whole year, you might be gaining 1.5 pounds of muscle in your pecs. So you're spending double the time in the gym for only 50% more growth. So one thing that should be clear both from what Pax said with these numbers and from this rule of thumb is you get diminishing returns. So you can see gains with very little volume, but to get your best gains, you will have to spend more and more and disproportionately more time in the gym to maximize your muscle growth.

SPEAKER_00 16:04

Yeah. It goes back to the good old Pareto principle 80-20. Maybe. Yeah, you know the vibes. But it's it's true, and it's it's weird that we and we're gonna get into the practical side of things later in this episode, because obviously, how do you apply all this? And that's a big issue that we often see in the community. But regardless, the Pareto principle or diminishing returns is the th is a thing with most things that you want to get really good at. Um, but with trading volume, people seem to lose their minds a bit when you tell them, hey, if you know you want to leave no stone unturned, you'll likely have to do more. However, there are ways where you can do a lot of volume and manage your time and not necessarily leave in the gym. More on that later, stick around, building tension, all that.

SPEAKER_01 16:46

One thing I was just want to point out. We mentioned the highest tier being 30 to 42 sets per week per muscle. Um above that, so 43 plus sets. That was a butt. Hey, I took this shine from you. Above that, there wasn't really that much data to really conclusively say we see more hypertrophy or we see less hypertrophy, or maybe we see the same hypertrophy. Because historically in exercise science, and this applies to many things when it comes to training dose, like how much you train applies to many different sports, not just lifting. So whether you're a runner and you're saying, okay, how many hours should I spend per week running? Or whether you're a lifter, trying to determine how many sets per week to do for a muscle. What you're really trying to determine there is the relationship between training dose, how much you do, and the outcome of interest. When it comes to exercise science in general, but also specifically in our niche of muscle building, for a long time it's been assumed that volume and hypertrophy follow an inverted U relationship. Yep. So the more volume you do to a point, the more growth you see. But the returns are diminishing, as you can kind of tell by the inverted U shape. For every additional set you do, you get a bit less out of it. Up until the plateau region of that inverted U relationship. Where although you're doing more volume, but you're doing more sets per reper muscle, you're not necessarily observing much more hypertrophy. And then past that plateau region, you get onto the descending limit of the inverted U relationship. At which point you're training so much that theoretically maybe your muscle just isn't able to keep up. You start getting an overtraining, some of the muscle protein synthesis response take a hit, whatever it might be. Doing more volume doesn't actually get you more growth. That's kind of been the hypothesis or the prevailing model in the field for a long time. And this is, again, generalized across many different sports. But the issue with this model is that it's mostly theoretical at this point. Yep. It makes a lot of sense that the body would operate in this way. Right? Like there has to be some sort of plateau at some point. There has to be some sort of descending limb at some point. You can't just do more and more to infinity and keep building more and more muscle. But at the very least, at this stage with the research we have, that plateau hasn't been found. So up until at least 42 sets per week per muscle, fractionally, we're still on the ascending limb of the enverge relationship. And where the plateau exists, which it probably it probably does for sure, but where it exists, we just don't know yet. It might be at 50 sets, it might be at 60 sets, it might be even far beyond that. But it's worth noting that for now, we don't quite know whether occurs on average. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 19:11

And to add to that, one for the people that may be confused because they're thinking, ah, 52 sets study, why are you saying 43 sets? The average sets in that study were like 37. Plus, when we look at the overtraining literature, we see that overtraining and resistance training is very rare. And yes, theoretically, there is a point where you are doing more and more and more and more, and then you're you know unable to keep up, and there's a deleterious effect on muscle growth. But one would have to sustain training under extremely unfavorable conditions to reach that point. So it's a bit, I think, a worry or a model that has some problems baked into it. Anywho's. Um, when it comes to strength, things looked even better. I think even cooler, I guess even more minimalistic, with some big terms that people haven't highlighted. So we saw that minimum effective dose was at one set per week. The higher efficiency uh tier was at roughly two sets. Things started showing diminishing returns at like three to four sets and sort of plateaued at four sets per lift per week. But people took that number to say that okay, strength is absolutely maximized at four sets, and after that you are just wasting your time. But when we look at the data a bit closer and we look at uh strength adaptations in trained lifters, and specifically studies that looked at both strength and hypertrophy together, because one thing a lot of people um missed out was that a lot of these studies that were included didn't necessarily look at both strength and hypertrophy together. Some looked most looked mostly at strength. Uh, when we look at trained lifters and strength adaptations, more volume resulted in more growth. And that's what, as a small aside, that's something we also observed in the studies we did with power lifters for my PhD, where sure people made great gains with just like one to four sets, uh, but adding more led to more gains.

SPEAKER_01 21:09

Yeah, I think the strength data in general. I'm not sure if we'll discuss the strong by science analysis.

SPEAKER_00 21:16

Yeah, well, we can we can we we can touch on it. Really cool article that you should check out. Uh it's only 280 pages long. Uh go to strongerby science.com slash volume. Um very cool domain name. But yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:27

I mean I'll give the the kind of cliffs from that article so as to not spend 280 pages worth of hairtime here. Uh basically, strength probably does also follow a similar relationship as hypertrophy, where more volume does beget you greater strength gains. The that's probably also particularly true in the long term, where many of the things or many of the factors that underlie strength as a characteristic are relatively unchangeable in the long term. So if you're in a new lift, And you start lifting and technique gets better, your muscle physiology might change to get more efficient at a lift, things like pination angles, so the way your muscle fibers are oriented in muscle, all those things can change as you start lifting, as you start practicing certain movements. And that can lead to rapid strength gains when you first start lifting. But as you get more and more advanced, the correlation at least, so how closely linked size and strength are, increases massively. So, for example, in correlation studies we have on how strong that link is, oftentimes the variation explained by one characteristic in the other one goes from about 20% when you're relatively untrained to about 90% when you become more highly trained. So all that to say, uh further analyses of this data have shown that you do need higher volumes to maximize strength gates. And that in the long term, even if you focus on strength, you probably do need to train with relatively higher volumes to maximize strength gates.

unknown 22:55

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 22:56

That's what we often see in practice as well when we look at power lifters. Um now, the authors, as I mentioned, also looked at frequency and how that impacts muscle hypertrophy. And we have a nice little inside scoop here from Dr. Milo Wolfe. What uh Pelandon noted is that frequency um seems to impact hypertrophy mainly as a way to distribute volume, um, so not as an independent variable with its own dose response. However, however.

SPEAKER_01 23:27

So we'll keep the the full frequency discussion for a future episode on training routines or frequency what have you. And this is kind of uh jumping ahead to another meta-analysis here that we haven't discussed yet, I don't believe, by Remitt and colleagues. Yes, indeed. Um volume, obviously, we've mostly discussed right now in the context of weekly volume. And the reason for that is simple. It's that how you distribute volume, like Pat just mentioned when it came to frequency, doesn't really matter all that much. What matters mostly is you doing sufficient volume over the course of the week, month, year, decade. How you distribute that, whether you do it across three sessions, five sessions, etc., is a much smaller variable to deal with. That's kind of where we started with volume in the first place, because one of the main variables that actually impact hypertrophy. However, another meta-analysis by the same group of authors actually, by Remerton colleagues, uh pre-printed earlier last year, I believe. Shut up. Looked specifically at per session volume. So we know that to maximize growth, you probably need somewhere in the ballpark of 30, 40 plus fractional weekly sets. And beyond that, we don't know what happens yet. But when it comes to how to distribute that within workouts, they actually simply looked at how much hypertrophy do we see from a workout, depending on how many sets you do for a muscle in that workout. And they saw a similar shape relationship to Pellant, but the returns were even more diminishing. So what they saw was that going up to around 11 fractional sets in a single session for a single muscle increased hypertrophy. But going past around 11 sets per muscle per session didn't reliably or measurably, or we couldn't confidently say it increased hypertrophy any further. Importantly, the slope of that relationship seems to be a bit more intense or a bit steeper than the slope of the relationship observed in the PAL analysis, which means that within a workout, you get more strongly diminishing returns on doing more and more sets for a muscle than you do in a week. So, really what the game is here is trying to maximize that area under the curve. So instead of doing, say, 11 sets for a muscle in two sessions to get to 22 total sets for the week, you might be better off splitting that volume into more workouts because you get more area under the curve because the relationship between session volume and hypertrophy has even more strongly diminishing returns. So this is kind of theoretical, and I want to fully couch that this is like speculative. You heard it here first, though. You heard it here first. I do suspect that if you were doing, say, 20 or 30 fractional sets per week, I do think that as much as we discussed, like, oh, you don't want to go beyond around 11 sets in a single session for a single muscle, and that's kind of the only rule of thumb we usually give. I do probably think there's a benefit to spreading out your volume more. So that you're not just cutting it at 11 sets. You're actually doing maybe like five sets per workout per muscle. And you're spreading that across four workouts. So that you get so that each of the sets you do and each of the workouts you do has a higher bang for buck. Uh-huh. You get more stimulus out of each set. So while you might be doing the same total volume across the week, each of those sets might be a bit more effective. Do I think it's going to be a nine-day difference? No. Is it speculative at this point? Yes. Like you're essentially combining the results of two very good meta-analyses to arrive at a rough, like, tentative takeaway for lifters. But I do think it's worth experimenting with, and personally, like just kind of jumping ahead briefly. I've been training many major muscle groups five to seven times a week. And doing maybe like two to five sets each time. And I think that might be a perfectly valid and maybe even slightly better approach to training mode.

SPEAKER_00 27:00

Yeah. I can already hear people saying, yeah, that is probably because your training quality and you can actually push close to failure, because you cannot actually do many hard sets in one single session, which we'll get to in a second. Very quickly, as far as frequency and strength went, frequency did appear to affect strength slightly differently. So even when controlling for training volume, um, the author saw that an increased training frequency seemed to benefit strength. Um, going from one to two sessions per week uh gave a substantial benefit for a specific lift. Beyond that, diminishing returns started to kick in. Um anecdotally, or at least in practice, training lifts multiple times per week, likely a good idea, but obviously even once a week will still get you plenty of gains. And to take it back to hypertrophy, like yes, if you're doing a bunch of training volume, higher frequencies, great. With lower training volumes, that may be the case still. And spoiler alert, we are working on a study uh that will look at that uh to to a to to a certain extent at least. More on that at the end of the episode. Um, but yeah, it's important to note that even if you train once uh a muscle once a week, if you're not doing a whole lot of volume, you're still gonna make gains, obviously. Cool. That's the state of the literature.

SPEAKER_01 28:17

Yeah. State of the evidence. There is one quick thing I wanted to shout out before we go into the coaching corner segment of the episode. For sure. Where we discuss kind of our practical experiences as lifters and coaches and how to apply this stuff. Um we mentioned that the meta-analysis by Palden colleagues controlled for things like intervention duration, training status, and other variables even. That's true. I think we can go a bit further than that and explain what that means. They performed subgroup analyses, and they're all available in their additional analyses. Like if you look at their manuscript, you'll see an OSF link. You can click on that, you can see all the graphs, it's all publicly available. Which, hey, credit to the authors, open sciences.

SPEAKER_00 28:54

We'll wait while people do that, no? Indeed.

SPEAKER_01 28:57

I'll give you a minute. Totally. All right. Um so what they did is they did subgroup analyses to see, all right, if we look only at studies that look at train lifters, do we see that actually, because hey, for example, like people have posited that more trained lifters are stronger and they can put more stress and fatigue on their bodies, and therefore they can't benefit from as high of a volume as, say, someone weaker or more less trained, you know? Do we see that actually in train lifters, they don't benefit from higher volumes, and that shape the relationship changes meaningfully. They did the same for so untrained versus trained, which usually means someone's never lifted versus about a year plus in these studies. They do the same for rest times. So you could argue, yeah, okay, but many of these studies use super short rest times, like a minute or two. That's not enough to maximize hypertrophy. With long rest times, each set becomes more effective, and therefore you don't need as many sets overall to maximize growth. Or you might say the same about, okay, sure, high volume works for about eight weeks, but then your body becomes desensitized to it. Or you might say that it's only if you don't train a failure. If you train a failure, each set becomes more effective, and you can only really recover from like five or ten sets per week per muscle and build muscle as a result, otherwise you'll overtrain. They looked at all these questions. So they looked at studies that uh involved only training to failure versus only training submaximally, or shorter studies versus longer studies, or shorter rest times versus long rest times. None of these variables seem to really moderate the relationship much. In other words, doing more volume causing more growth was robust to all of these potential moderators, things that could alter the relationship between volume and hypertrophy. So as a general takeaway, and then with these sort of meta-analyses that are, you know, drawing meta-regressions, analyzing data in more exploratory ways, oftentimes you do want to take a step back and just focus on the main findings, as opposed to really trying to dig down into the nuances, because oftentimes then you can get statistical artifacts. It's called But when you combine those moderator analyses with the overall finding, I do think that the overall finding people should just take away from this is look, doing more volume on a weekly basis causes more growth. And that seems to be the case whether you're taking longer or shorter rest time, so whether you're training to failure or not. As long as fundamentally, and this is like this isn't even fully known, but it's a good kind of practical safeguard, as long as you're recovering, exactly, almost no matter what your training program really looks like, doing more sets will probably lead to more growth.

unknown 31:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:21

And that's the boring truth.

SPEAKER_00 31:22

And it's it's crazy how that needs to be explicitly mentioned because it's baked in. Obviously, if you're unable to recover from a training program and you find yourself needing to take a week off every second week, you are doing too much volume. But the name of the game, and that's a good transition to the coaching government. But we've missed an elephant in the room, and we'll get to that now. Um, but that's the thing that annoys me the most. The recommendation is do more, assuming you can do more. If you can't do more, do the most you can while recovering. But swelling and edema, which we'll very briefly mention, is something that. So, for a bit of background, we were waiting for this meta for quite some time. We are both very lifting-pilled, and we're as much as people want to call us out, which is ironic for being you know, high-volume proponents, there's nothing more in this world that we would love for this meta to go like, you know what, guys? Actually, false alarm. You need five sets a week to maximize muscle growth. Anything beyond that is you're just wasting your time. Um, there was a group, well, there were many people that pointed out that hey, the strength gains in the Palindra analysis seem to plateau around four sets, so it's not possible that muscle growth is increasing because then you'd also see strength increases, which we briefly talked about. That's not necessarily a hundred percent true. Um, but when it comes to the worry, and we'll not get into the Uber details of this, of the hypertrophy results observed being edema, being swelling, essentially not being actual muscle growth. Um, we've had recent evidence, but also previous evidence as well, showing that it is not really a concern or something that explains the data.

SPEAKER_01 33:10

Yeah. So there was a recent study published in the Quads, I believe, by D'Souza et al.

SPEAKER_00 33:15

I don't think D'Souza led it.

SPEAKER_01 33:17

He was part of the author team, but yeah, it was a bit of script here, so forgive any technical and accuracy.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

Shout out to the author. I will look it up while you riff.

SPEAKER_01 33:25

So there's one study on that recently in train lifters, which basically showed that edema in train lifters, who fundamentally adapted to the stress of lifting, doesn't seem to be a huge response. And that's likely true also of these higher volume studies. There was also previous research in some of the most muscle damaging protocols ever uh in eccentric training in unaccustomed conditions by Marguerite Talis and colleagues.

SPEAKER_00 33:48

Yeah, respect. Hey, I remember. And the author here was uh Mike Alvarez. Michael Varres. And shout out Alison Ennens for also being involved, and shout out everybody else who was here. Shout out to everyone, ever.

SPEAKER_01 33:58

Um in this context of very damaging training, even then, after they performed this training for 10 weeks, or I believe eight or ten weeks, again, forgive any inaccuracies, the muscle swelling response, or the muscle damage markers rather, had kind of dissipated altogether. So I don't believe in that state they directly measured muscle swelling, but they looked at a variety of muscle damage-related markers, which strongly correlate with swelling typically. And those markers are basically attenuated entirely by 24 hours after training sessions by that point. Once they'd repeated that training session that was initially highly damaging and caused a lot of muscle damage, by 10 weeks in they'd gotten pretty used to it. And that's illustrative of a concept called the repeated bout effect. Basically, it's a technical norm, technical term, norm.

SPEAKER_00 34:43

NERM term Name term, we're European. We speak multiple languages. Americans excuse me.

SPEAKER_01 34:49

Don't get at us. So repeated bout effect basically just describes the idea that upon being exposed to a stress repeatedly, your body's response to it diminishes with time. So if, for example, you train legs for the first ever time, you set foot in the gym, and you absolutely destroy yourself. You do leg press, squats, lunges, leg extensions, you do it all. You will get absolutely cripplingly sore. But if you do that the next week, and then the next week, and then for another 20 weeks, by the 25th week, your body's not really responding to it that much anymore in terms of muscle damage. That doesn't mean it's ineffective for growth. Those are two separate things. But purely as far as the damage or fatigue response goes, that tends to diminish as repeatedly expose your body to the same bout. That's where the term repeated bout effect comes from. And so in the context of these volume studies, where oftentimes lifters are training for 12 weeks, twice a week, they're repeatedly doing the exact same session, maybe a slightly different one. And they're oftentimes trained lifters. 24, 48, 72 hours after the workout, it's likely the muscle swelling response is relatively minimal.

SPEAKER_00 35:55

And that's what uh they did in Alvira's, where they looked at 7, 14, and 21 sets of quads, and then looked at swelling and edema um 24, 48, and 72 hours. And strength as well, and there was no negative impact even in the higher volume groups.

SPEAKER_01 36:13

Yeah, which again goes to say, like overtraining as a trained lifter, especially, is pretty difficult.

SPEAKER_00 36:19

Yeah, uh, let's uh throw some numbers here. You've done six plates on the deadlift for five reps, I've done uh two six hundred and thirty-five pounds on the deadlift, we're strong, we are muscular, just so nobody comes at us. Thank you so much. Here are the credentials, happy days. Because that's a common criticism of science-based lifting that yeah, obviously you pencil neck nerds, don't train hard enough. If I did more than four sets to failure because I'm a hardcore lifter, there's no chance I could go back and do that. Um, but anecdotally, plenty of people do a lot of volume. Shout out Eric Helms, who does 300 sets in a single session.

SPEAKER_01 36:54

And then comes back in the PM session, does 600 sets.

SPEAKER_00 36:56

True lifting warrior. But let's get to the coaching corner. Okay, you've heard us yet. What's the coaching corner? It is the corner where the coaches sit. The corner right now. It is essentially the part of the podcast where we give you practical takeaways. We talk about our experience as coaches in the trenches and how you can take the literature and apply it to your practice. Essentially, being evidence-based is not just, hey, okay, Pellant showed um more is more. So we'll just do more until whatever. Um, plus, if you want to work with an amazing coach, head to wolfcoaching.net. Is it.net or something.com respect.

SPEAKER_01 37:34

I paid out to Azu for this one. Yeah. Uh and drpak.com for your favorite bot coach.

SPEAKER_00 37:40

I paid a lot, but hey, good investment. That domain name is worth like triple the price now.

SPEAKER_01 37:43

Is it? Yeah, yeah, actually. You got valuation, like excellent. Respect. All right. Don't take this as investment advice, please.

SPEAKER_00 37:49

It is though legal advice and medical advice. That's too. Um, so the first question is okay, how much volume should I be doing? Um that's not the first question on the sheet, but it is the first question.

SPEAKER_01 38:04

And for people who are listening to this being like, I feel like I'm missing something here.

SPEAKER_00 38:07

That's true.

SPEAKER_01 38:08

You should be watching this. So I recommend watching it for visual enjoyment.

SPEAKER_00 38:16

Arguably, and I'm happy to to fight anyone over this. One of the top three best-looking fitness podcasts on YouTube. I'll say I'll say worldwide at the moment. But like strictly evidence-based fitness, not like general health and whatever. We're not millionaires one day, hopefully. Anyways, when it comes to how much volume, obviously, that's where it may be useful to have certain archetypes, but we're not going to break it down to that much detail. When it comes to the average person out there who may just want to gain some muscle, get stronger, gain the health benefits of resistance training, sticking around minimum effective dose or from minimum effective dose to roughly 10 fractional sets per week is a great way to make great gains, be healthy, and so on and so on. So that's four to ten. Four to ten, yeah. I think that's a good range. 10 sets is especially fractional sets, is not that much volume, especially when you structure your program um appropriately, which we'll get to in a second. I've said we'll we'll get to in a second a lot. I built a lot of tension here.

SPEAKER_01 39:22

A lot of seconds, I mean.

SPEAKER_00 39:23

A lot of seconds. Um, when it comes to everybody else, and this is important, like this is a podcast, not for your average person out there who is just trying to get fit and gain some muscle. But at the end of the day, this is a podcast for those who love lifting, who are into lifting, and who are people who lift as a hobby and want to actually make as many gains as possible, even if diminishing returns aren't involved. So, for those people, my default recommendation, and I want to hear your opinion, fellow doctor, Dr. Milo Wolfe, is to have a starting point, starting volume of around 15 to 25 fractional sets per muscle group per week, which I think is a solid starting point for somebody who's looking to get more out of their training and has the time and the energy to dedicate it to lifting.

SPEAKER_01 40:08

Yeah. As much as you said we wouldn't break it down into archetypes, I do think there's some value to it. Okay. Um, and then both breaking it down on a weekly and a workout basis. Blast. So absolutely agree. Four of the 10 sets fractionally per week per muscle is a great minimum dose. Hashtag trainsmaller not longer.com type of place to be. Blast. Then 15 to 25 fraction weekly sets is great for just sort of solid growth. And there's a very good chance that most people, most of the time, can train all of their muscles with that level of volume and still recover fine overall. Because there is a discussion to be had between like local recovery and quote unquote systemic recovery. So things that aren't just is your biceps fatigued, but also psychologically do you feel like training today? Or is your nervous system fatigued? Whatever that means. Whatever that means indeed. Um But I think 15 to 25 weekly fractional sets per muscle is the kind of level that most people most of the time can kind of absolutely sustain, tolerate, and benefit from. And are not really chasing super high volumes where they're not getting much more for spending more time in the gym. I just kind of want to give some numbers for most people most of the time. When it comes to maintaining size, which we didn't really discuss so far, likely somewhere in the ballpark of two to three fractional weekly sets is enough. So that's actually how MadApp works as well. If you tell Mad Apt, hey, I don't really care about my my traps, but I still want to like maintain their size. My adapt will put your traps roughly at this volume level to maintain their size, so it just takes all the thinking out of it. Then if you want to build some muscle, so minimum dose, four to ten sets, I think is good. Four sets to start building some muscle, closer to ten fractional sets to build a pre-sural muscle. For someone who's specializing on muscle, and this is also how my adapt works perfectly, or who really wants to maximize growth in general, if you're trying to maximize growth of your whole body altogether, you pretty much just want to push the volume for all individual muscle groups up higher until you either don't have the time for it anymore, or you start to have trouble recovering. If you're trying to specialize on a muscle, it's likely that volume will be somewhere in the ballpark of 30 to maybe 40 fractional weekly sets and maybe beyond. That oftentimes, time-wise, and also like motivation-wise, comes with a sacrifice of saying, all right, I'm gonna push my chest to 30, 40 fractional weekly sets, specialize and emphasize it. But at the same time, I'm gonna take my back volume and take it down to maybe like four to ten sets. So just enough to build some muscle, but not so much that it starts taking a bunch of time and I don't have enough time to train chest anymore. So that's on a weekly basis. On a workout basis, it gets interesting. As we mentioned, going past 11 sets per workout isn't ideal. So that's kind of like a good thing to remember in general. But also, depending on your weekly volume, that kind of dictates how many sets you might want to do per session. If you're just maintaining the size of a given muscle and you're doing like two to three sets per week per muscle, you can genuinely do that in a single workout. So you do two to three sets in a workout, one workout a week, you're done. Done. If you're doing a minimum dose approach and you're doing sort of like four to ten fractional sets per week per muscle, you might want to split that into one, two, or maybe even more workouts. So I'd say like one is kind of for sure the minimum. You don't want to train it less than once a week. Twice might be the better, and then beyond that you might get more, but it's really not clipped. If you're maximizing or you're specializing, that's where the kind of limit of 11 sets becomes more relevant, right? Because you're actually getting enough volume across a week to throw it in matter. I would say there, a good rule of thumb for most people is do five to ten sets per session per muscle. You can go below that if you want. And my suspicion is based on what we discussed earlier, you might see the same growth or maybe a bit more growth. But I think for most people, most of the time, it's a very simple rule five to ten sets fractionally counted per muscle per workout is a really good ballpark to be. So it kind of covers the person who just wants to maintain their size, who you know has built a great physician. They don't really want to go beyond it. We've covered the person who wants to use the minimum dose approach, train smaller, not longer. And we've covered the person who's specializing on a muscle or who's, you know, like just wants to maximize growth overall. I think those are kind of the archetypes I would break it down with. For sure.

SPEAKER_00 44:16

Yeah, it's it's also important to note, and this is something I used to nocebo myself with back in the day, that if you go from very high volumes back to low volumes, the because there's this idea of progressive overload, and that's a topic for another episode. But there's this idea that okay, if I go from doing high volumes to now low volumes, I'm not longer seeing going to be seeing any growth because I'm used to doing more and now I'm doing less. But in reality, when we look at the literature, and there's a great study by Hermann Adal, which we had the honor of being involved in, um, which looked at exactly that essentially single set training, minimum effective dose training, obviously single set per session, but you know, about four fractional sets per week in people in trained lifters who did higher volumes before that, and they made substantial um muscle growth gains.

SPEAKER_01 45:04

And these are pretty trained people, by the way. They had like four and a half years of lifting experience on average, I think. Yeah. So we're involved in that study, and that was really cool to see.

SPEAKER_00 45:11

The only reason I'm mentioning that is that people tend to view volume recommendations sometimes as if they are lifetime recommendations, as if, like, okay, once you pick your volume camp, then that's all back. In reality, though, and I'll use you as an example, I'll let you speak actually about your volume um journey in the past few months.

SPEAKER_01 45:31

Yeah, so I'll go further on that. In the past, I've trained with volumes as high as around 200 sets for my whole body.

SPEAKER_02 45:40

Bliss.

SPEAKER_01 45:41

Uh so this was back when I subscribed to the kind of like, let's call it the RP model of training. Shout out. Um, where you would kind of start around minimum dose, so it's like four to ten sets per week for muscle, and then gradually build up week upon week, adding sets every single week until about four to eight weeks later, you kind of hit your peak week, where you're hitting high volume for all muscles at once. And I would kind of build up from around like maybe 50, 60 sets a week to up to 200 sets by peak week. And that would be like RP9 or one repetitive reserve on most sets. Then I kind of went down in volume for a while, maybe closer to like 100 or 150 sets uh per week on average. The truth is that one, the research on whether or not your muscles become desensitized to it. Like unless you're trying to high volumes, right? Does your body kind of go, okay, well now this is where we need to keep growing? You know, it's kind of like a medication where you need to keep up in those to get the effects still, like you get you build up a tolerance essentially. The research on that really isn't that compelling. There's more and more coming out on it, and we're aware of some cool studies by Paladin qualities coming out as well. Um but the kind of the the summary here is your previous training volume probably doesn't determine how effective your future training volume will be. So just because you train with high volumes in the past doesn't necessarily mean low volumes are gonna be any less effective for you in the future. So if you have a stressful period coming up, you have exams, wife breaks up with you, whatever it might be, and you're forced to train less, you're probably not going to be harmed on account of having done pre previously high volumes. The same probably also goes from doing low volumes previously to go doing high volumes. The research currently doesn't really suggest that you would benefit more from high volumes because you've been doing low volume so far. Yeah. At best, it might be that you're less advanced. Yeah, exactly. You haven't built as much muscle yet, you have more left to build, so you can build it a bit more quickly than someone who's really advanced who's been training for a long time. But fundamentally, your previous training volume doesn't really matter. So don't be afraid to change things up if your circumstances change, or if you just don't enjoy lifting for a while, or whatever it might be.

SPEAKER_00 47:44

And you specifically in the last few months, you went from you had a period where yeah, you were busy, you were getting your lifts in, but you were doing what, like 10 to 20 sets a week?

SPEAKER_01 47:54

Yeah, I would say possible. But like maybe even five to fifteen sometimes. And this was because I was moving houses specifically. Yeah, yeah, true. Uh moving houses, traveling a bit and getting sick and stuff. So for a few months it was a bit lower, and then I upped it again. And yeah. There's nothing wrong with that.

SPEAKER_00 48:08

There's nothing wrong with that, and that will naturally happen. So when it comes to training volume, a recommendation that I want to get out there is that hey, when you have the time and the recovery capability and you're feeling like it, and you're a serious lifter who wants to maximize growth, do more training volume. It doesn't mean that you should just like adopt a volume style or be a high volume guy or a low volume guy. Unless life goes really well and then you're blessed, and you can always do high volumes and everything is great, then you will likely find yourself during periods where you're either doing minimum effective dose training or slightly less volume. And obviously, there will also come points where you may not care about certain muscle groups. So all of a sudden, you're now doing a lot of back training, but not as much chest training or whatever. Um, and there's obviously a practical ceiling that exists regardless when it comes to training volume. You most of you, I assume, have lives, have stress, uh, there may be, you know, an injury, a nagging pain, whatever. Um, that said though, I wanted to talk about ways to fit more volume in because that's a big myth, I am all, and I think that's a myth that as a social group we've debunked heavily. Um, Eric Helms is another person who is pretty good at that, but there are many ways that you can utilize many methods to cram a lot of volume in without spending that much time lifting. So let's get to it. Number one, and I will shout out the wolf here for opening our eyes, dr. Wolf, Milo Wolf, wolfcoaching.com, mydub.com. Um, the first one is exercise selection. So, like coming up as a strength um pilled lifter, if you weren't back squatting and deadlifting, you were wasting your time. If you weren't doing barbell exercises, you were wasting your time. And then obviously in hype the hypertrophy world, there's this thing about like heavy loads and certain exercises. When it comes to exercise selection, if you select exercises much like the sissy squat, the pistol squat, chin-ups, dips, bodyweight exercises, or exercises that require minimal loading or are stack loaded, you can get in and out the gym much quicker.

SPEAKER_01 50:22

Yeah, 100%. One easy example is Romanian deadlifts or stiff-legged deadlifts versus good mornings. Indeed. Straight up the same movement pattern, same range of motion for your hip extensors, same hamstring stretch, same everything, genuinely requires maybe half the weight for many lifters. Yep. So it kind of becomes a no-brainer for someone who's optimizing for time efficiency. Yeah. Presumably, very similar movements, you get the same stimulus per set, but one in that stimulus to time equation, time efficiency, one is just more time efficient. In the time it takes you to do three sets of RDLs, you might be able to do five sets of good mornings. It's kind of a no-brainer when you think about it in those terms, and when you remove some of the mystique from exercises like squats, bench, deadlift, whatever exercise you can attach to, and you realize, okay, your muscles respond to tension fundamentally. And whether you're doing a fishing good morning or a barbell RDL that requires you to set up four plates on each side and a deficit and whatnot, it's gonna grow.

SPEAKER_00 51:18

100%. Good morning is a good example, and it's uh something that changed my leg training lately. That and um a modified version of the leg press. As somebody who's a relatively strong deadlifter, I always dreaded good mor um RDLs. And moving to Smith Machine Good Mornings, I'm able to do plate and a half per side, obviously adjusting tempo and making the exercise a bit harder, which is something else that you can do to make things uh a bit more time efficient. But all of a sudden, four sets of good mornings in one session, or even six sets sometimes, are taking arguably 60 to 70% less time than RDLs.

SPEAKER_01 51:54

To keep it practical, let me just uh run off the list of things that makes an exercise more time efficient.

SPEAKER_00 51:58

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 52:00

One is stretch emphasis, and this is kind of uh obviously Dr. Wolf would say this.

SPEAKER_00 52:05

Um big stretch mentioned, baby 2026, we're bringing it back.

SPEAKER_01 52:08

We're bringing it back, baby. Metanalysis coming soon. So all the comparisons, not all comparisons, but the vast majority of the comparisons we have of more stretch-focused exercises versus less stretch-focused exercises, I think C the leg curl versus line like curl, where the seat-leg curl is more stretch on my hands, overhead extension, pushdown, bicep curl, incline, or preach curl. All these comparisons tend to show that the more stretch-focused exercise gives you more growth in the same time. So when it comes to maximizing time efficiency, getting more out of each set, picking more stretch-focused exercises, probably more time efficient. Then minimizing the setup time required. So exercises like barbell squats, where you oftentimes have to set up safeties, get the J-hoax to the right height, put the barbell in, a load of plate by plate, oftentimes have to use a large amount of weight, those aren't great. If you can find an alternative that requires less setup, that's great. You're coming out oftentimes two, three, five minutes from the exercise setup time. That's two to three or five minutes that you could be spending doing extra sets instead. Then warm-up time. Some exercises anecdotally just happen to take more tangible than a four. Is there necessarily a physiological reason for it? We don't really know. There might be, there might not be. But people just reported that squats, deadlifts, benching, overhead pressing, those compound exercises that are more, let's call them multi-joint in nature, like a lot more stabilization required, tend to require more molar time. So if you can find an exercise that is the same but requires less molar time, great, you've saved time. Um generally speaking, that'll be dumbbell exercises, because you literally pick up dumbbells and get going. That'll be exercised with fewer pieces of equipment as well, in terms of like set of time. So if you can do a dumbbell bent overall over, say like a chest-supported T-barrow that is often busy, that'll save you time. And stack load of machine and bodyweight exercises. So anything where you can just select the weight and get going is great. And exercises that are involve your body weight oftentimes involve a sufficient amount of weight already, just by using your actual body weight, so you can just get going without even setting anything up. Which is awesome for people with no equipment or who just want to save time. So I'd say those are kind of the main criteria when it comes to time efficiency. You can also layer in things like, oh, how easy is it to get this in a busy gym? Or how easy is this to drop set? Or how easy is it to superset with another exercise? Like, for example, a dumb out bench press with a double out row. But those are kind of the main considerations I would say.

SPEAKER_00 54:23

Yeah, for sure. And since you mentioned them, supersets and drop sets are another amazing way, especially if you stack them with smart exercise selection, ticket boxes that Milo just mentioned. Um, you are talking about, so in our study by Berkettal, we found that supersets compared to straight sets, uh, 36% less time for the same amount of volume. Now, if you're trying to cram as much volume as you want in, using agonist antagonist supersets, meaning supersets that are targeting two opposing muscles, biceps, triceps, back, chest, whatever, is an amazing way that people don't use that much because they're afraid that they can't make supersets work because of uh logistical constraints. When in reality, you can pick exercises like bodyweight exercises, do dips and chin-ups. All of a sudden you can get six to well, four to six sets for each exercise. So a total of eight to twelve sets for your chest, back, triceps, biceps, okay, obviously, fractional sets, a bit less for triceps and biceps, in what? Ten minutes? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 55:24

Yeah, you can go crazy. And to be clear, the research on this is pretty compelling. So we have four long-term studies, pretty much all showing the same muscle growth in like 40% less time, roughly, on average. We have four studies acutely looking at performance at least. And they all pretty much show like the same performance, especially when you're doing antagonistic muscles like quads and hamstrings, like the leg extension and leg curl, or what have you. Just to give a rough protocol, what I would say is do a set of exercise A, like a dip, rest for about, I would say, 30 to 60 seconds, and we'll get more into rest times in a second. Do a set of exercise B, so pull it, for example, and rest again for maybe 30 to 60 seconds. Closer to 30 seconds for like isolation exercises, where you don't really need that much rest, and maybe closer to 60 seconds for more compound exercises. But that's really all you need, and there's research to back it up, and it's really effective. Speaking of special techniques though, what about drop sets?

SPEAKER_00 56:13

Yeah, drop sets, similar situation as with supersets, as in like very time efficient. Um, not as much research as supersets. I'd say more actually. More.

SPEAKER_01 56:23

There's uh six studies, I believe, on drop sets, and there's only four long-term studies on supersets.

SPEAKER_00 56:28

Fair enough. Okay, you win this one. Um, but joking aside, yeah, exactly the same, the same concept. Now, with dropsets specifically, and maybe you can uh add a bit of fun fact sauce here. Um, because obviously with dropsets, things in practice may be a bit more difficult if you are, let's say, using just dumbbells. So going from the heavier set of dumbbells to the lighter to the running the rack, as we would say back in the day, is a bit more difficult and maybe like less time efficient than doing uh drops on a stack loaded machine. So for stack loaded stuff, amazing. Simply adjust the stack and do roughly two to four drops uh where you low uh lower the load by 20 to 30 percent. 20 percent typically. Yeah, 20%. And then roughly, and this is a rough calculation, the extra four-ish drops will equate one whole set, one and a half whole sets?

SPEAKER_01 57:23

More than that potentially. So obviously we don't have many studies on this, so it's kind of like us just using what's there to get a rough approximation. But in these studies, we found that drop sets were as effective as traditional training when on average they performed 60% more total sets when doing drop sets. So let's say, for example, they were doing three sets, three traditional sets in the normal group, they would do about five sets of drop sets. So like one set, drop 20%, another set, etc. etc. for four total drops or five total sets. So sixty percent extra. So if you want to do the equivalent of three sets, maybe do three times one point six, four point eight, five sets total. If you want to do the equivalent of two sets, maybe like two times one point six, so just one set, then two drops, and you're done. Um drop sets might be even more effective than supersets in terms of pure time saving. So, like in the Coleman meta-analysis, shout out Max Coleman, uh, they found that on average it saved I think 50 to 70% of the workout duration. Yeah. Obviously, Khalid being like Pac mentioned, some exercises don't really lend themselves to it. Um this is also partly where some of the I would say aversion to barbell exercises comes from. For for us now as hypertrophy trainees. Yeah, indeed. Is drop setting a squat or a barbell bench press or a deadlift or an over press or a bent over row, an RDL. Kind of a pain and less time efficient because you have to stop the set, take off your straps sometimes if you're doing deadlifts, take off some plates, get back to it. On deadlifts. It's a long process, both in terms of time and in terms of fatigue and in terms of like just breathing and everything. So the same exercises that tend to be more time efficient in general tend also to be better suited to drop sets. Yeah. So that's great news. For sure. The final thing, and by the way, with drop sets, the kind of protocol I would use is do a hard set typically of like four to ten reps. The reason I go pretty low is because you're effectively doing a really long set on your drop set. So you don't want to do a ton of reps on the first set and turn it into like a million marathon rep set. Um so four to ten reps on the first set, immediately drop the weight by 20%, and do another set, immediately drop the weight by 20% again, and that's 20% relative to the previous weight. So let's say you start with 100 pounds, you go down to 80 pounds, and then you go down to 64 pounds. So 20% relative to the last one. And you repeat that process for as many total sets as you want. But no rest, 20% drops relative to the previous weight. Speaking of rest periods, because in this context, obviously, with drop sets, we don't take any rest. When it comes to traditional training, people might need less rest than they think.

SPEAKER_00 59:53

Yep, indeed. Singer et al, shout out Singer et al, great basketball player, no joke, actually. Um, and then analysis we had the honor of getting involved with from the Applied Muscle Development Lab, where we essentially found by looking at all the recent literature, uh, just for those of you that remember, the common recommendation back in the day was hey, three minutes, roughly three minutes to maximize hypertrophy. Yep. Um, and we found that roughly one and a half minutes seems to be plenty, um, maybe closer to two minutes for the lower body to maximize muscle growth. And resting less than that wasn't catastrophic. Yes, it resulted in less muscle growth, but by no means was it something that would absolutely destroy your gains. Resting more, totally fine, didn't impact gains negatively. Um, but I do think that in practice, if you're feeling ready to go and you've rested for one and a half minutes, but as Milo will add now, even if you're not feeling ready to go, one and a half minutes between each set, perfect, and a great way for you to cram in the ton of volume. If you're forcing three to five minutes of rest, um, just because you think you'll maximize hypertrophy, it will take you a while to cram in a ton of training volume. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:09

And just to kind of do a quick sanity check of this. Let's do this. One, it's by no means clear that you need to maximize performance on every set to maximize hypertrophy. That's just an assumption that some people make. There's not really any solid evidence behind this. The second kind of like practical litmus test or like common sense test, let's call it. But like, alright, let's say you do need to maximize you need to rest for three to five minutes between sets to maximize hypertrophy because you get better performance. Alright, well, why is that? Because oftentimes going from one to two minutes of rest, let's say three to five minutes of rest, you might be getting an extra rep, maybe two reps on that set. So instead of doing ten reps, you get a live another 12 reps. But by resting one to two minutes, you've just freed up two to three minutes that you can do another set with. Well, you could get an extra eight to ten reps, maybe. So just on like a purely okay, tension is the main thing that matters for hypertrophy, generally speaking. And let's not get into the fallacy of oh volume load is all that matters, we just calculate reps and calculate stimulus. But just on like a pure common sense level of alright, uh is there really much sense to getting an extra rep or two? Boosting hypertrophy that much?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:20

I'll give you some platitudes if you want, because that's uh that's how it works. Yep. Uh yeah, more performance, more tension, um progressive overload is uh another thing that gets thrown out. Tissue. Tissue. Tissue talks. Uh quality tissue, not the bad one. Not the other one. Uh but yeah, this uh the I the idea that um your performance from set to set is what will predict hypertrophy. And if you change one of the variables that directly affects performance and your performance drops as a result of changing that variable, then that means worse performance. No, because you haven't rested as long. So you can't compare resting four minutes.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:58

And if that was the case, then okay, we should be resting for 10 minutes because I'm pretty sure basically it becomes an example of Goodhart's law of your metric of progress, your metric of an effective session is your performance in that session. Uh-huh. And so you do whatever is required to optimize for that metric. Yeah. When you turn a proxy for stimulus into your target, you start optimizing for that target, not realizing you're actually not optimizing for hypertrophy. Respect. You're optimizing purely for performance, which isn't the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:26

Yeah. And again, don't take this as an absolute rule and that if you rest more than one and a half minutes, you are doing something bad. There may be a case where you need to do that. But look, if you are in shape and you've been training hypertrophy style, aka doing a bunch of training volume for a while, for a lot of muscle groups and a lot of exercises, assuming you're smart with your exercise selection, I'm pretty sure that you'll find that one and a half to two minutes is plenty of rest. Yes, you'll hear the hardcore lifter tell you, yeah, there's no chance, brother, I can do a hardcore set of insert exercise. Uh if I don't rest for five minutes, one press X for doubt. Two, doesn't mean anything. Three, we're stronger than that. I'm joking. Um anyways, now when it comes to knowing whether the volume that you're doing is right, there's a few very simple things that you can do. Um, one, are you recovering between sessions? And again, this is not the time for platitudes and looking at proxies like soreness or your subjective feeling, but rather performance over time. Are you able to sustain your performance in the gym over time? Are you seeing big decreases along the lines of like 20 to 30 percent on consecutive weeks? And if not, things are fine.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:45

And to be more specific, by performance, we literally mean okay, you benched last week on Monday, you're benching this week on Monday. Indeed. Are you doing the same weight for at least the same number of reps? If you can do more weight or more reps, recovery is not even close to a concern for you. Indeed. You were able to recover and even adapt to the stimulus. Yeah. It's worth noting that this is more of a practical safeguard. Like we don't have research to say, okay, recovery is really the thing to go by. Yep, indeed. But it's good to have some sort of practical thing to go by. Because otherwise, all we're left with really is do more. Which is kind of the rule of thumb to use alongside it. If you're recovering, just do more. Yep. If you're able to. If your time allows for it, if you're motivated for it, etc. And you're not progressing as fast as you want to. Doing more is one of the most surefire ways of achieving it.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:31

Yep. I agree. 100%. And um it's also worth noting, and it grinds my ears a bit when people talk about body weight. Um, they're very happy to acknowledge that body weight will fluctuate a lot. It's something everybody agrees on. And the fact that you know don't pay too much attention to scale. Your performance, like there's so much noise and so many external factors that will affect your performance in the gym by some extent that you're not controlling. Um, and it's totally normal. And as an advanced lifter, The advanced lifters that are listening know this, your performance will go up and down slightly every week. Look at it over time, and just because you did one uh rep less on that one exercise without also accounting every other exercise involving the same musculature, it doesn't mean that you're underperforming or under-recovering. Um, so I just want to highlight that. Now, when it comes to certain nocibo traps and training volume, there's this idea that oh yeah, but there's no chance I could take sets close to failure or have quality sets. The extra volume will be junk volume because um it's impossible to train this hard. And any study that has shown that is either not real or they didn't train hard or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:46

I'm smiling for people who are watching this because uh I once made a thousand dollars disproving a claim like this.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:53

So indeed. But then people people will say, oh yeah, it was just one session and you got paid to do it.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:58

Yeah, which I you know I didn't prepare for at all.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:00

So yeah, that was that was wild.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:02

Anyways, I so I'll kind of counter you a little bit on this, which is in exercise science broadly, there is such a thing as the pacing effect. The pacing effect describes the phenomenon of when you know you've got a lot coming up, like a lot of workload left, you tend to pace yourself. You don't give it your maximum effort. Okay. So in the context of running, that might be okay, you're running 10 miles. You're not gonna give it your own mile one because you're like, ah, I got nine more miles and I may not absolutely destroy myself here. And this can be very subconscious. In the context of lifting, if you're doing one set for chest on a day, you might go all out. Because you know that's the only chance you have, and you're not really worried about what comes next. If you're doing 20 sets for chest, as an extra extreme example, you might very well hold back, subconsciously or consciously. The way to beat that is to simply compare your performance to when you were training with lower volumes and make sure that you're getting the same numbers or more over time. And ultimately, if you're progressing over time, chances are it's fine. But the one uh thing I will say on the pacing effect, as a rule of thumb, to know whether or not you're doing too much volume, if you notice that you really start to like not push as hard anymore, especially on the earlier sets of a workout, like sets one, two, three, and you have five sets to do on exercise, that might be a sign that personally either you need to, you know, man up whatever. That's um, or maybe you're doing too much volume. And maybe you can temporarily drop it to like three or four, really emphasize training quality, aka actually train close to failure, and then gradually up it as you notice, okay, I can feel in pretty good now. I can push it beyond. So you can call it an TRT and as you've turned into a man, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:37

There you go. We're joking, obviously, for those that are just listening.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:41

Toxic masculinity. Here we are. Yeah, so I think the last thing we wanted to mention.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:47

Just on that note, you can also just take everything to failure and make sure that every set is very hard and make sure that you're actually to failure. And I think that's also a way to safeguard it, but I hear your point because you could be You could be tricking yourself. Trigging yourself. We've seen that.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:04

If you're a failure, that's that's that's true. Anyways, our last point was simply that as I mentioned earlier, there is such a thing as too much volume, it's just rarely seen in practice. And using practical safeguards like recovery and checking training quality goes a long way towards avoiding any risk of doing too much.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:25

For the for most of you as well, like the fear of overdoing it is a slightly irrational fear. Obviously, I get that there's the one exception of the guy that is neurotic about training and that will push through sickness or whatever. Um, but you will get a ton of warning signs. Think of it as driving towards a cliff. There will be a cliff with uh five miles of road with warning signs, stops, people waving at you. Um I'm not sure where I'm going with this, and there's a car making noises outside.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:56

But anyways, I was just thinking that that car could very well do what Pac is describing here.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:00

Very fast because it's five miles, right? Yeah, I tried to do a Milo Wolf example and effed myself. But that's what you get. You get the bold, dumbass, and the smart, bearded uh anyways. But yeah, you'll get a lot of warning signs. In order to overtrain or overdo it with volume, it's going to be you'll have to actively push through bad nights of sleep, lots of soreness, bad performance, etc. Don't worry about it. So, and during the final, the verdict. Turning pages for some reason. I I know the verdict. What is the verdict? Is the concept of the verdict even in the next episode? We are giving you like a top, top-level, top-down summary of a two-minute summary. Two-minute summary, totally two. Two minutes. I'm starting the timer now. And go. Um, what's on the rest today, my little wolf? Nothing, a timer watch. A timer watch, perfect, awesome. So, one, start counting fractional sets. Um, don't just look at uh direct sets. Uh, that's a good way to quantify training volume. If you if you haven't been doing so, have a look at your program. You may be doing more volume than you think you're already doing. And once you start counting fractional sets, the recommendations of like 25 or 30 sets or 15 to 25 sets are not gonna seem as wild as one may think. Um, and for hypertrophy, if you're somebody who just wants to gain muscle, be healthy, and have a solid physique, sure, four to ten sets, minimum effective dose, baby, great. If you are a lifter and it's your hobby and you love lifting, 15 to 25 as a starting point with all the disclaimers and the caveats that we mentioned. And in general, as a rule of thumb, and I like what Milo said, if you can do more, do more. So doing more is generally a good point. For strength, which we completely ignored, how many minutes do I have? One minute left. One minute left, easy. You can spend 10 seconds on strength, nobody cares. Yeah, for strength, whatever, do some heavy sets per week, happy days. Um, but yeah, in and in all seriousness, literally three to five direct sets per week will get you a lot of sets, a lot of gains, include five to ten fractional sets for muscle groups that are of interest to deadlifts that you care about. And always remember you can do as little as four sets per week for everything and make amazing gains. And if you don't want to think about training volume and you want somebody to do everything for you in your pocket, myadupp.com, that's the whole point of myadapp. Mydub is not a workout tracker, it's not a workout uh program designer, and it's a smart coach that will take all the things away from your lifting. And that's it. Before we go though, the lab report, we've been working on a new study. I know, but in all seriousness, we are working on a minimum dose study uh that is ongoing at the moment at Lehman College Applied Muscle Development Lab, looking at frequency. So essentially doing minimum effective dose training once or twice per week, same volume. Might be a cool study for what you mentioned about frequency, but we shall see.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:44

Basically, looking at the question of if you're doing the same number of total weekly sets and say five sets per week, are you better off doing it in one session? So five sets in the workout, you're done? Or two sessions, maybe like two sets one time, three sets the other time. Yeah. Which is really interesting because that's you know, at the heart of how do you spread volume. Sure, you don't want to go beyond ten sets per week per muscle, uh per workout per muscle, or eleven rather. But is there a benefit to spreading it out even more and just doing a little bit every day? Yeah. Stimulate, don't annihilate. That was your plagiarity for the episode.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:15

And that's the end of it. Myadap.com, don't forget to check it out.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:19

The sponsor and the main On a serious note, since we're being self-indulgent now.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:25

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:26

All of this is literally how my adapter works. That's true. I'm not exaggerating when I say it's using these volume numbers, maintenance, minimum dose, specializing or maximizing muscle directly into its algorithms. And more than that, it's actually evaluating in the background how you recover, whether or not you're recovering on time. And then adjusting how much volume it thinks you can do and benefit from. Yeah. So then if you say, okay, look, I want to train two hours every day, it will actually push you volume-wise. It'll take you to 30, 40 fraction weekly sets if your body's ready for it. It analyzes your biofeedback, which is a big word that it didn't just make up to evaluate that stuff. So truly, if you want no thinking and you just want really solid size-based training, check out MADAP.com and use code MUSCELLAB for two weeks free. Alternatively, if you would rather a handsome bald man show up at your house and tell you, hey, it's time to do two sets today and build some muscle, check out drpath.com for your coaching needs.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:21

And conversely, if you want a guy with just a timer watch and not a legendary watch on his wrist, who is also very strong and very evidence-based and all that good jazz, wolfcoaching.com to work with Milo. But one note on my adapt, and I know, okay, it's an it's a free podcast, guys. You've got a lot of knowledge. Let us plug it. I want to highlight hey, no AI, no templates, all our algorithms are custom and lots of updates coming. Yes, we'll address that in the future. But yeah, thank you so much for listening. We'll see you. And leave some reviews, please. Leave some reviews for the podcast. For the podcast. For everything, yeah. Like, comment, subscribe if you're on YouTube. Yeah, check out our YouTube channels, buy stuff. Thank you. If there's anything else you can buy from us, please just buy it. Muscle Lab peace.