How Many Sets Should I Do?

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. >> 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, exercise selection, rep ranges, anything pertaining to building muscle, gaining strength, getting leaner.

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 trading 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.

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 my 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.

1:31 So if you want to have all this handled for you, check out my adapt.com and you can use code muscle lab to get two weeks for free. >> 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 time weight time sets or sets time reps time weight. What was the the common one you used? >> sets time reps time weight. And sometimes people would even add in distance.

2:02 >> Oh. >> So that you could calculate work done. >> Yeah. >> You know force times distance equals work. >> In famous. >> All that to say definitions varied but the fundamental one was sets time reps time weight was volume or sometimes referred to as volume load. >> Indeed. And what you got out of that was tonnage usually measured in in kilos. a number that sounded very scientific and promised to give you a lot of insight, but in reality that's quite problematic.

2:27 >> Yeah. And that's interesting you mentioned that cuz 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 like press, for example, your volume load can be off the charts simply because like 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 often times 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.

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 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, 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 going to do 10 sets for our biceps." We won't only count the bicep curls and the basin 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?

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 sets 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 in 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.

5:08 >> 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 where the fractional model, which count as half a set for secondary muscle groups, came out ahead. 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.

5:33 Therefore, it's not possible that my biceps went close to failure. So, how can I count that as half a set? >> 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. Like 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.

6:22 >> Nice. And we'll get into that in one of the next episodes that we will do on training through 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 that training volume show 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.

7:02 >> Thank you very much. My English there was escape the room. obviously when it comes to strength things are slightly different in terms of mechanisms. There's other factors at play. neurological efficiency, leverages, tendons, etc., etc. but let's look at some of the applied evidence because one thing that we constantly yab about online and we'll be yapping about here as well is when it comes to mechanisms, sure, if we knew exactly if we kn 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 at 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.

7:55 >> Yeah, 100% agree. So, why don't we go into the applied studies now? >> Indeed. And we have been blessed after years of pestering pel in the town. If you saw the WhatsApp group chat, you'd know we were asking for this meta analysis/series of meta regression for years. The most upto-date meta on training volume after the the one before that was the Bazval one and before that the infamous 2017 Shaunfeld 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 Pelanadal 67 studies over 2,000 participants and anything specific that stuck out to you when it came to the methods?

8:50 >> Yeah, before I mentioned the methods I just want to emphasize something you said back in that like Shan Felmmetal analysis from 2017. The volume wars have been raging on for a long timedeed. 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 we could tell you with certainty or with much certainty at least whether one approach was better than the other.

9:18 And that's because even in the show and tellfel 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 a basal 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. with very high volumes. So even 20 plus sets doesn't really go far enough to really encompass what people do in practice.

10:17 So now this palent 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 where comparing high versus moderate versus low volume, you might be assigning certain numbers to descriptors, right? You might be saying high volume is over 20 sets.

10:41 Moderate volumes is 12 to 20 sets and low volumes is below 12 sets per week per 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 metal 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 volume >> 100%.

11:23 >> That's what kind of stuck out to me. Shout out to Pel and Natal. And it's cool to see and this is something you're potentially getting into more appropriate statistical approaches being worked in because obviously it's not like the authors in the past were like no we we're going to approach this in a wrong or worse way. It's that you know in the field of sports science stats not an expertise that many of us have. So the other cool thing was that in order to they separated essentially volume by by tiers of efficiency and looked at how much more volume was needed in order to detect a change in muscle hypertrophy that we were able to statistically be confident in that was actually there.

12:09 >> which was really cool. They also did that for strength. We will mention strength in this episode as well, but we're not going to focus too much too much on it cuz 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. let's get to some of the results. actually before we do that, they also controlled for things like intervention duration, training status, and frequency. So they also looked at the effect of those and that was something cool to see and obviously informs our practice. But starting with the big me 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 transparent longer.com you can pre-order now. four fractional sets per muscle group per week was the threshold for producing reliably detectable hypertrophy in about 10 weeks.

13:08 >> How do you feel about that? >> I'm I honestly say 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 push downs. And with that, you've reached four fractional sets. Go one set from those two sets of bench press, one set from those two still pressing, and another two direct sets from push downs.

13:40 >> 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 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. >> True. Still buy the book. There's more than just that. It's not one page of that. totally. if you then add six more sets, fractional sets, and you go to the 5 to 10 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 cuz that's the range. Ignore everything else we said. 30 to 42 sets.

14:56 Thank you for listening, Milo. anything you want to see the people out with? >> 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 overtraining, you're undertraining. >> It's It's true. I mean, by definition, >> that's true. >> What I would say, if you're confused at these numbers, there's a very easy, albeit slightly inaccurate rule of thumb.

15:20 >> 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're 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.

15:50 >> 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. >> Yeah, it goes back to the good old Pareto principle. 8020 maybe. >> Yeah, you know the vibes. But it's it's true and it's it's weird that we and we're going to 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 parto principle or diminishing returns is the is a thing with most things that you want to get really good at. but with training 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.

16:44 Building tension, all that. >> One thing I was just want to point out, we mentioned the highest tier being 30 to 42 sets per week per muscle. above that, so 42 plus sets. >> I was above. 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. >> Cuz historically in exercise science, and this applies to many things when it comes to training 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.

17:41 >> 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, you're doing more sets per per muscle, you're not necessarily observing much more hypertrophy. And then past that plateau region, you get onto the descending limb 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 overtraining.

18:13 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. 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. Y >> and keep building more and more muscle.

18:43 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 inverted 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 where that occurs on average.

19:10 >> Yep. And to add to that one, for the people that may be confused because they're thinking, 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 the serious effect on muscle growth but one would have to sustain training under extremely unfavorable conditions to reach that point. So it's a bit it's I think a worry or a model that has some problems baked into it. Anyh who, when it comes to strength, things looked even better. I think even cooler, I 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.

20:07 The higher efficiency 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 strength adaptations in trained lifters and specifically studies that looked at both strength and hypertrophy together because one thing a lot of people 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. 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 but adding more led to more gains >> yeah I think the strength data in general I'm not sure if we'll discuss the strong science analysis >> yeah we we can we can we can touch on it really cool article that you should check out. it's only 280 pages long.

21:23 Go to stronger science.com/vol. very cool domain name. But yeah, >> I mean I'll give the the kind of clips from that article so as to not spend 280 pages worth of air time here. basically strength probably does also follow a similar relationship as hypertrophy >> where more volume does be get 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 underly strength as a characteristic are relatively unchangeable in the long term. -huh.

21:58 >> So, if you're a new lifter and you start lifting and technique gets better, your muscle physiology might change to get more efficient at lift. Things like penation angle, so the way your muscle fibers are oriented in the muscle, all of 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 often times 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, further analyses of this data have shown that you do need higher volumes to maximize strength gains 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 gains.

22:56 >> That's what we often see in practice as well when we look at power lifters. 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 Wolf. What Palanadal noted is that frequency seems to impact hypertrophy mainly as a way to distribute volume. so not as an an independent variable with its own dose response. However, however, so we'll keep the the full frequency discussion for a future episode on training routines or frequency what have you.

23:35 And this is kind of jumping ahead to another meta analysis here that we haven't discussed yet I don't believe by Remington colleagues. >> Yes indeed. >> volume obviously we've mostly discussed right now in the context of weekly volume. >> Mhm. >> 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 why we started with volume in the first place because one of the main variables that actually impact hypertrophy.

24:13 However, another meta analysis by the same group of authors actually by Remington colleagues preprinted 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 then 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 peland, 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.

25:23 >> 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.

25:51 >> 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 be 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, you're not just cutting at 11 sets.

26:14 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 each of the sets you do and each of the workouts you do has a higher bang for buck. 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 na difference?

26:32 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 body. Yeah, I can already hear people saying, "Yeah, that is probably because your training quality and you can actually push close to failure cuz 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 different.

27:19 So, even when controlling for training volume, the author saw that an increased training frequency seemed to benefit strength. going from one to two sess sessions per week gave a substantial benefit for a specific lift. Beyond that, diminishing returns started to kick to kick in. 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 that will look at that to to a certain extent at least.

28:01 More on that at the end of the episode. but yeah, it's important to note that even if you train once a muscle once a week, if you're not doing a whole lot of volume, you're still going to make gains obviously. Cool. That's the state of the literature. >> 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. >> Sure. >> Where we discuss kind of our practical experiences as lifters and coaches and how to apply this stuff.

28:30 >> we mentioned that the meta analysis by Pal and 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. >> Mhm. >> They performed subgroup analyses and they're all available in their additional analyses. He's 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 you authors open sciences >> we'll wait while people do that now >> indeed we'll give you a minute >> totally >> all right 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 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.

29:28 >> 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 did 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 10 sets per week per muscle and build muscle as a result, otherwise you'll overtrain.

30:07 They looked at all these questions. So they studies that involved only training to failure versus only training sub maximally 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 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 often times 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 often times then you can get statistical artifacts it's called >> but when you combine those moderator analyses with the overall finding I do think 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 times, whether you train 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.

31:15 >> Exactly. >> Almost no matter what your training program really looks like, doing more sets will probably lead to more growth. >> Yeah. >> And that's the boring truth. >> 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. but that's the thing that annoys me the most. The recommendation is do more, assuming you can do more. If you can 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 peeled 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.

32:26 there was a group well there were many people that pointed out that hey the strength gains in the palent 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 100% true. 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. 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.

33:10 >> Yeah. So there was a recent study published in the quads I believe by Duza at all. >> I don't think Duza led it. He was part of the author team but yeah it was >> off script here so forgive any technical inaccuracy. >> Shout out to the author. I will look it up while you riff. >> So there's one study on on that recently in trainers 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 in eccentric training in unaccustomed conditions by Margaret Talis and colleagues.

33:48 >> Yeah, respect. >> Hey, I remember. >> And the author here was Michael Alvarez and >> shout out Alison Enis for also being involved and shout out everybody else who was here. everyone ever in this context of very damaging training even then after they performed this training for 10 weeks or I believe 8 to 10 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 study 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 session By that point, once they 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.

34:39 >> Basically, it's a technical term, technical term, nerm >> name term. >> We're European baby. >> We speak multiple languages. Americans, excuse us. >> Don't get at us. So repeat about effect basically just describes the idea that upon being exposed to a stressor 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.

35:12 >> Mhm. 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 is 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 often times 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 often times trained lifters 24, 48, 72 hours after the workout. It's likely the muscle swelling response is relatively minimal. M and that's what they did in Alvirus where they looked at 7, 14 and 21 sets of quads and then looked at swelling and edema 24 48 and 72 hours and strength as well and there was no negative impact even in the higher volume groups >> which again goes to say like >> overtraining as a train lifter especially is pretty difficult.

36:19 >> Yeah. let's throw some numbers here. You've done six plates on the deadlift for five reps. I've done two 635 lbs 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. Cuz 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 cuz I'm a hardcore lifter, there's no chance I could go back and do that. but anecdotally, plenty of people do a lot of volume. Shout out Eric Helms who does 300 sets in a in a single session or >> the AM session and then comes back in the PM session does 600 sets.

36:56 >> True lifting warrior. But let's get to the coaching corner. Okay, you've heard us. Yeah. >> What's the coaching corner? >> Huh? >> What's the coaching corner? >> It is the corner where the coaches sit. >> We're 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, Palant showed more is more, so we'll just do more until whatever. plus if you want to work with an amazing coach, head to wolfcoaching.net. Is it >> actually I paid out the wazoo for this one.

37:36 >> Yeah. >> and drpac.com for your favorite bald coach. >> I paid a lot. But hey, good investment. That domain name is worth like triple the price now. >> Is it? >> Yeah. Yeah, you got valation. Like, excellent. >> Respect. All right. >> Interesting, baby. Don't take this as investment advice, please. >> It is though legal advice and medical advice. >> That's true. >> so the first question is, okay, how much volume should I be doing?

37:59 that's not the first question on the sheet, but it is the first question. >> For a loop there, buddy. And for people who are listening to this being like, I feel like I'm missing something here. >> That's true. >> You should be watching this. It'll be on YouTube >> and we went to great lengths to make it happen. >> So, I recommend watching it for visual enjoyment. arguably, and I'm happy to to fight anyone over this, one of the top three best looking fitness podcasts >> on YouTube.

38:27 >> 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.

39:07 >> So that's four to 10. >> Four to 10. 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 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. >> A lot of seconds. >> A lot of seconds. 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.

39:34 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 are involved. So for those people, my default recommendation, and I want to hear your opinion, fellow doctor, Dr. per mile wolf 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 dedicated to lifting.

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. >> and then both breaking it down on a weekly and a workout basis. >> Blast. So absolutely agree four to 10 sets fractionally per week per muscle is a great minimum dose #train smaller 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?

40:54 >> Or is your nervous system fatigued? Whatever that means, >> whatever that means indeed. >> 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 they're 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.

41:24 >> So that's actually how Madap works as well. If you tell Mad, hey, I don't really care about my my traps, but I still want to like maintain their size. Mad 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 do four to 10 sets I think is good. four sets to start building some muscle, closer to 10 fractional sets to build appreciable muscle for someone who's specializing on a muscle. And this is also how MAP works practically or who really wants to maximize growth in general. If you're trying to maximize growth of your whole body altogether, you pretty much want to push the volume for all individual muscle groups higher until you either don't have the time for it anymore or you start to have trouble recovering.

42:06 >> Mhm. If you're trying to specialize on a muscle, it's likely that volume will be somewhere in the ballpark of 30 maybe 40 fractional weekly sets and maybe beyond. That often times time wise and also like motivation wise comes with a sacrifice of saying all right I'm going to push my chest to 30 40 fractional weekly sets specialize and emphasize it >> but at the same time I'm going to take my back volume and take it down to maybe like four to 10 sets. Yep. 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.

42:45 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.

43:05 >> Done. >> If you're doing a minimum dose approach and you're doing sort of like four to 10 fractional sets per week per muscle, you might want to split that into one, two, or maybe even more workouts. So I would 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 a bit better. And then beyond that, you might get more, but it's really not clear. 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 doing a volume across a week for the matter. I would say there a good rule of thumb for most people is do five to 10 sets per session per muscle.

43:40 >> Mhm. >> 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 as a very simple rule, five to 10 sets fractionally counted per muscle per workout is a really good ballark to be. So we kind of covered the person who just wants to maintain their size, you know, has built a great physique. They don't want really 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.

44:12 >> Mhm. >> I think those are kind of the archetypes I would break it down >> for sure. Yeah. It's it's also important to note and this is something I used to know 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 Hermadon which we had the honor of being involved in 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 muscle growth gains >> and these were pretty trained people by the way they had like four and a half years of lifting experience on average I think.

45:08 >> Yeah. So, we're involved in that study and that was really cool to see. >> And 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 >> going back >> in reality though and I'll use you as an example. I'll let you speak actually about your volume journey in the past few months. >> 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.

45:41 >> so this was back when I subscribed to the kind of like, let's call it the RP model of training. >> Shout out. >> where you would kind of start around minimum dose. So, it's like four to 10 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 rep in reserve on most sets. Then I kind of went down in volume for a while, maybe closer to like 100 or 150 sets per week on average.

46:19 The truth is that one, the research on whether or not your muscles become desensitized to it, like once you train at high volumes, right, does your body kind of go, okay, well now this is what we need to keep growing. you know, it's kind of like a medication where you need to keep up those to get the effects still like you get you build up a tolerance essentially. >> The research on that really isn't that compelling.

46:39 >> There's more and more coming out on it and we're aware of some cool studies by Paladin colleagues coming out as well. 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 trained with high volumes in the past doesn't necessarily mean low volumes are going to 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 them pre previously high volumes. The same probably also goes from doing low volumes previously to doing high volumes.

47:18 >> 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.

47:37 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. M and you specifically in the last few months you went from you had a period where yeah you were busy you were getting your lift in but you were doing what like 10 to 20 sets a week. >> Yeah I would say like maybe even 5 to 15 sometimes and this was cuz I was moving houses specifically.

48:00 >> Yeah. Yeah. True. >> 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. Basically >> 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.

48:57 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. there may be, you know, an injury, a nagging pain, whatever. that said though, I wanted to talk about ways to fit more volume in because that's a big mytho and I think that's a myth that as a social group we've debunked heavily. 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, myub.com. the first one is exercise selection. So, like coming up as a strength pill lifter, if you weren't back squatting and deadlifting, you were wasting your time.

49:57 If you weren't doing barbell exercises, you were wasting your time. And then obviously in h 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 squat, the pistol squat, chin-ups, dips, body weightight exercises, or exercises that require minimal loading or are stack loaded, you can get in and out the gym much quicker. >> Yeah, 100%. One easy example is Romanian deadlifts or stiff leg deadlifts versus good mornings. ended >> 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.

50:38 >> 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. >> Yeah. >> In the time it takes you to do three sets of RDL's, 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 machine good morning or a barbell RDL that requires you to set up four plates on each side and deficit and whatnot, it's going to grow >> 100%. Good morning is a good example and it's a something that changed my leg training lately. that and a modified version of the leg press. As somebody who's a relatively strong deadlifter, I always dreaded good RDL's and moving to Smith machine good mornings. I'm able to do plate and a half per side.

51:36 Obviously adjusting tempo and making the exercise a bit harder, which is something else that you can do to make things 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 RDOS's. >> Y to keep it practical, let me just run off the list of things that makes an excess more time efficient. >> Yeah, for sure.

52:00 >> One is stretch emphasis. And this is kind of a obviously Dr. Wolf would say this. >> big stretch mention baby 2026. We're bringing it back. >> We're bringing it back, baby. Met analysis 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. Think seated leg curl versus lying leg curl where the seated leg curl is more stretch on my hamstrings. Overhead extension, push down, 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.

52:34 So when it comes to maximizing time efficiency, getting more out of each set, picking more stretch focus exercises probably more time efficient. Then minimizing the setup time required. So exercises like barbell squats where you often times have to set up safeties, get the J hooks to the right height, put the barbell in, load a plate by plate, often times have to use a large amount of weight. Those aren't great. If you can find an alter 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 time to warm up for. Is there necessarily a physiological reason for it? We don't really know. There might be, there might not be. People just report that squats, deadlifts, benching, overhead pressing, those compound exercises that are more, let's call them multi- joint in nature, >> that can put a lot more stabilization required, tend to require more time. So, if you can find an exercise that is the same but requires less time, great.

53:31 You've saved time. generally speaking, that'll be dumbbell exercises because you literally pick up dumbbells and get going. That'll be exercise with fewer pieces of equipment as well in terms of like set of time. So if you can do a dumbbell bent over row over say like a chest supported t- bar row that is often busy that will save you time and stack loaded machine and body weight exercises. So anything where you can just select the weight and get going is great and exercises that involve your body weight oftent times involve a sufficient amount of weight already just by using your actual body weight that 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.

54:06 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 dumbbell bench press with a dumbbell row. But those are kind of the main considerations I would say. >> 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. Tick the boxes that Milo just mentioned. you are talking about. So in our study by burkatal we found that supersets compared to straight sets 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 logistical constraints. When in reality, you can pick exercises like body weightight 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 8 to 12 sets for your chest, back, triceps, biceps.

55:18 Okay. Obviously, fractional sets a bit less for triceps and biceps in what? 10 minutes. >> Yeah. Yeah. You can go crazy. And to be clear, the research on this is pretty compelling. M >> 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 same performance especially when you're doing antagonistic muscles like quads and hamstrings like a 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.

55:56 do a set of exercise B. So, a pull-up 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? >> Yeah, drop sets similar situation as with supersets as in like very time efficient. not as much research as supersets.

56:22 >> I'd say more actually. There's six studies, I believe, on drop sets, and there's only four long-term studies on supersets. >> Fair enough. Okay, you win this one. but joking aside, yeah, exactly the same the same concept. Now, with drop sets specifically, and maybe you can add a bit of fun fact sauce here. cuz obviously with drop sets, 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 light less time efficient than doing u drops on a stack loaded machine.

57:01 So for stack loaded stuff amazing simply adjust the stack and do roughly two to four drops where you lower the load by 20 to 30%. 20%. >> Yeah. 20% and then roughly and this is a rough calculation the extra fourish drops will equate one whole set one and a half whole sets >> 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.

57:31 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 60% extra. So if you want to do the equivalent of three sets, maybe do three * 1.6 4.8 eight five sets total. So you want to do the equivalent of two sets maybe like two * 1.6. So just one set then two drops and you're done.

58:06 >> Mhm. >> drop sets might be even more effective than super sets in terms of pure time saving. So like in the Coleman meta analysis, shout out Max Coleman. they found that on average it saved I think 50 to 70% of the workout duration. >> Yeah. >> Obviously caveat being like P mentioned some exercises don't really lend themselves to it. this is also partly where some of the I would say aversion to barbell exercises comes from >> for for us now as hypertrophy trainers.

58:36 >> Yeah, indeed. is drop setting a squat or a barbell bench press or a deadlift or an over press or a bent over row and 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 deadlift >> 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 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 10 reps. The reason I go pretty low is because you're effectively doing a really long set with your drop set.

59:18 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. so four to 10 reps on the first set, immediately drop the weight by 20%, 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 lb, you go down to 80 lb, and then you go down to 64 lb. 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.

59:44 >> Mhm. >> 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. >> Yep. Indeed. Singer Atal, shout out singer. Great basketball player. No joke, actually. and an 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 just for those of you that remember the common recommendation back in the day was hey 3 minutes roughly 3 minutes to maximize hypertrophy. Yep. and we found that roughly one and a half minutes seems to be plenty. 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. 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 a ton of volume. If you're forcing 3 to 5 minutes of rest, just because you think you'll maximize hypertrophy, it will take you a while to cram in a ton of training volume.

61:09 >> Yeah. 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 all right, let's say you do need to maxim you need to rest for 3 to 5 minutes between sets to maximize hypertrophy >> because you get better performance, >> right? Well, why is that? Because often times going from one to two minutes of rest, say three to five minutes of rest, you might be getting an extra rep, maybe two reps on that set. So instead of doing 10 reps, you get 11 or 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 >> where you could get an extra 8 to 10 reps maybe. So just like a purely okay, tension is the main thing that matters for feet generally speaking. And let's not get into the fallacy of oh volume load is all that matters. We just calculate reps. I mean, calculate stimulus. But just on like a pure common sense level of all right, is there really much sense to getting an extra rep or two boosting hypertrophy that much?

62:20 >> I'll give you some platitudes if you want because that's that's how it works. >> Yeah, more performance, more tension. progressive overload is another thing that gets thrown out. >> Tissue >> tissue >> tissue talks >> quality tissue not the other one. but yeah this the the idea that 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 4 minutes. And if that was the case, then okay, we should be resting for 10 minutes cuz I'm pretty sure >> basically it becomes an example of goodart's law.

63:06 >> Yeah. >> Of your metric of progress, your metric of an effective session is your performance in that session. >> 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. >> Optimizing purely for performance, which isn't the same thing. >> 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 if I don't rest for 5 minutes." One, press X for doubt. Two, doesn't mean anything. three were stronger than that. I'm joking.

64:12 anyways, now when it comes to know knowing whether the volume that you're doing is right, there's a few very simple things that you can do. 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% on consecutive weeks? And if not, things are fine.

64:45 >> 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.

65:10 >> Yep, indeed. >> But it's good to have some sort of practical thing to go by >> because otherwise all that 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. >> Yeah. >> 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. Yeah, I agree 100%. And it's also worth noting and it grinds my gears a bit when people talk about body weight 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 the 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 that 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.

66:05 Look at it over time. And just because you did one rep less on that one exercise without also counting every other exercise involving the same musculature, it doesn't mean that you're underperforming or underreovering. so I just want to highlight that. Now, when it comes to certain noibo 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 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. I'm smiling for people who are watching this because I once made a thousand dollars disproving a claim like this. So >> indeed, but then people people will say, "Oh yeah, it was just one session and you got paid to do it."

66:58 >> Yeah. Which I you know didn't prepare for at all. So >> yeah, that was that was wild. >> Anyways, I so I'll kind of counter you a little on this which is >> in exercise science broadly there is such a thing as the pacing effect. >> Uhhuh. >> The pacing effect describes a phenomenon of when you know you've got a lot coming up like a lot of workload left. Mhm. >> You tend to pace yourself.

67:17 >> You don't give it your maximum effort. >> So, in the context of running, that might be, okay, you're running 10 miles, you're not going to give it your all mile one because you're like, I got nine more miles. Let me 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, >> balls to >> 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 per chest, that's an extreme example, you might very well pull back subconsciously or consciously.

67:47 >> The way to beat that is to simply compare your performance to when you were trading 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 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, when 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 that's >> or maybe you're doing too much oil 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 feeling pretty good now I can push >> after you've gone TRT and >> yeah as you turn into a man yeah >> there you go we're joking obviously for those that are just listening to masculinity here we are >> yeah so I think the last thing we wanted to mention >> 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.

68:59 But I hear your point because you could be >> you could be tricking yourself >> tricking yourself. We've seen that >> if you're a failure 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 is 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. >> Yeah, 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 they will push through sickness or whatever. but you will get a ton of warning signs. Think of it as driving towards a cliff. There will be a cliff with 5 miles of road with warning signs, stops, people waving at you. I'm not sure where I'm going with this. And there's a car making noises outside. But anyways, >> I was just thinking that car could very well do what P is describing here >> very fast cuz it's 5 miles, right? Yeah.

70:02 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. 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 episode? We are giving you like a top top level top down summary of >> like a two-minute summary.

70:39 >> Two-minute summary. Totally. >> Two minutes. I'm starting the timer now >> and go. what's on the wrist today, my love wolf? >> Nothing. A timer watch. >> A timer watch. Perfect. Awesome. So, one, start counting fractional sets. don't just look at direct sets. that's a good way to quantify training volume if 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 going to seem as wild as one may think. and for hypertrophy, if you're somebody who just wants to gain muscle, be healthy, and have a solid physique, sure, four to 10 sets, minimum effective dose, baby.

71:22 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.

71:44 >> Can spend 10 seconds on strength. Nobody cares. >> Yeah. For strength, whatever you do some heavy sets per week, heavy days. but yeah, in 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 10 fractional sets for muscle groups that are of interest to the lifts 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, myab.com. That's the whole point of Myab. MAD is not a workout tracker. It's not a workout program designer. And it's a smart coach that will take all the thing 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 that is ongoing at the moment at Leman 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. 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.

72:56 >> 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 10 sets per week per muscle, per workout per muscle or 11 rather, but is there a benefit to spreading it out even more and just doing a little bit every day? >> Yeah, I would also stimulate it. Stimulate, don't annihilate. That was your pleasure for the episode. >> And that's the end of it. Myadup.com.

73:18 Don't forget to check it out. The sponsor and the main. >> On a serious note, since we're being self-indulgent now, >> yes, >> all of this is literally how Mattup 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.

73:47 Yeah. >> So then if you say, "Okay, look, I want to train in 2 hours every day." >> It will actually push you volume wise. >> It'll take you to 30 40 fraction weekly sets. If your body is ready for it, it analyzes your bio feedback, >> which is a big word that didn't just make up >> to evaluate that stuff. So truly, if you want no thinking and you just want really solid science-based training, check out mattab.com and use code muscle lab for two weeks free. Yeah.

74:10 >> 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. 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 Kates and I 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.

74:55 >> 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. We out.