Volume and Frequency - How Much and How Often Should You Train for Muscle Growth?
Learn how volume and frequency can impact your muscle growth.
You finally start going to the gym. You have a trainer, or you go with your friend who has already been training for a while. It’s chest day, and you guys are moving from exercise to exercise, performing 3 sets of each: barbell bench press, dumbbell bench press, dumbbell flies, machine flies, cable flies, and dips, finally. After doing each of these exercises, you feel fulfilled, and it’s time to go home.
The amount of work you have put in on this chest day is called “volume.” In more specific terms, volume is the number of reps and sets you perform for any given muscle or muscle group. It could be measured across one training session, a week, or even a month.
Frequency, on the other hand, refers to how often you train any given muscle group. For example, if you train legs once a week, that’s how frequently you stimulate the muscles in your legs.
There are many misconceptions about how volume and frequency affect muscle growth. We’ll first begin with volume.
How Many Sets Per Muscle or Muscle Group Will Get You Gains?
The answer to this is simple. The most recent research suggests 6 - 8 sets per muscle group in one session, but there’s a small caveat. You see, these numbers present 6 - 8 sets per training session as what would work for the average person, but that’s just the average person. Based on other factors, such as age, genetics, sleep, and nutrition (I’ll discuss these more below), people react differently to training.
So, take this recommendation as a starting point for you to figure out whether to increase or decrease your volume. For example, if on an intense back day, you only perform 8 sets and you’re not seeing any progress, it would be best to increase that number a little. Remember to increase it only by a small percentage (20% works) so that you can accurately gauge your body’s response and change again if need be.
You Will Reach A Plateau if You Continue to Go Up
Fewer sets than 6 would likely result in less gains. In fact, the research generally suggests that the higher the volume, the more the gains. So, gains are directly proportional to volume.
However, you can’t increase your training volume infinitely. More sets and reps will not lead to more gains forever. So, you see that chest day workout I described earlier when I was explaining volume, that would be too much for most people. In the end, you will reach a plateau and stop gaining muscle. At this point, something called volume cycling could help.
Volume cycling simply means reducing your volume to allow your body some time to get sensitized to the stimulus again. Let’s use caffeine addiction as an example. If you take caffeine every day in substantial quantities, you’ll most likely develop a tolerance. And to remove some of this tolerance you’ve built up, restricting caffeine use may be necessary. The same applies to training.
More volume means more gains up until a point where it doesn’t, and current scientific research has not yet discovered what this point is exactly. But mind you, it does exist. You have to find it by slowly increasing your volume until you stop making progress. And when you do, drop volume a little so that your body can adjust. After a while, you can increase it again, and theoretically, you should see some gains.
Other Important Factors You Really Need to Consider
I have curated this advice with information from two main sources: my own years of experience training and data from scientific research, so you can trust it. However, even though you implement what you’re reading right now about volume, there are other things that can affect how much your effort will result in gains. Here are some of them:
Recovery: Whether your workouts are high-volume or low-volume, recovery is very important because it ensures consistency, among other things. You can’t come back to the gym for your second leg day this week if your quads are still sore from the last one. What’s the best thing to do for recovery? Eat the right nutrients and sleep well. That takes us directly to the next point.
Nutrition: This is the most difficult part of trying to get a great physique, and it is just as important as training, if not more. There are many disagreements about the right things to eat in the fitness industry, but everyone knows and agrees that for muscle growth, you need to eat enough protein. Even if you don’t track the other two macronutrients (fats and carbs), protein is important. And how much protein is enough? Well, Healthline suggests 1.2 to 2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight daily for people like you who are looking to get some muscle.
Exercise Intensity: Are you taking your sets to or close to failure? This will affect how you structure your sets. I, for one, am always looking to spend less time training, even though I love it, so that I can have some time to do the other things I want to do, like write these articles to help you achieve your dream physique. So, I take most of my sets to failure so that I can achieve more in less time. You can check out my last post on taking your sets to failure to learn more about why it is important and how you can be better at it.
So, What About Frequency?
This is already a long read, and you’ve probably started to wonder when it will end. Well, to make the information easier to digest, we’ll end it here. I’ll discuss frequency and how it can make or mar your gains in part 2 of this post, which will be published next week, so please subscribe if you haven’t already.
If this email does not appear in your inbox and appears somewhere else, like promotions or spam, you can simply drag it to your inbox so that you see all the new posts as they come out. Thank you for reading till the end, and I hope you implement some of this advice into your own training. Enjoy the gains!