This is the max volume you should do per workout

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:26 Muscle growth

01:46 Strength development

03:37 Muscle protein synthesis

04:05 Rodent research

05:33 My Online PT Certification Course

06:04 Neuromuscular fatigue

08:08 Conclusion

09:10 Outro

Transcript:

Everyone understands there is a limit to how much volume you can recover from. If you follow Renaissance Periodization and Mike Israetel you’ll probably know this as Maximum Adaptive Volume. This maximum adaptive volume is usually characterized on a weekly basis. There’s only so much volume you can do in a week and still recover from so that it’s productive for muscle growth and strength development. However, a new meta analysis provides compelling evidence that there’s also a maximum productive volume you can do in one workout.

The researchers did a very well done statistical analysis of 67 studies to determine the so-called dose response curve of per session training volume for muscle growth and strength development. You can see the data here. What this data shows is that there are sharply diminishing returns to training volume, the number of sets you do per muscle group per session, so this is in one workout, how many sets you are doing for that one muscle group that we’re interested in, and muscle growth. So at some point, after even just a few sets, if you add more sets you will still get additional muscle growth, but the effect is much smaller than for the initial sets. And this is the same as we see for total training volume, where the initial sets you do you get a lot of gains already, and you can make pretty good gains on low training volumes, but if you want to max out your gains you’re going to need to do much higher training volumes. And it’s a lot of extra work for relatively little extra gain.

However, the interesting thing is that the plateau per session seems to be low enough to have practical implications. A few years ago, I analyzed this literature myself and I concluded that there is a maximum productive volume, probably in the range of 9 to 13 sets per workout per muscle group. The new meta analysis came to almost exactly the same conclusion with 11 sets as the maximum productive volume. More on how this exactly was defined in a moment, but this was kind of the plateau effect beyond which further sets no longer contributed to a significant probability of additional gains.

For strength development the plateau occurred after just two direct sets – direct meaning actual sets of that specific exercise. Biggest strength is movement specific, so if you do squats, the best thing you can do to get better at squats is squats. But you could also do something like split squats or lunges, and that also contributes. If you count that volume as half, which they did by counting fractional volume, then the set volume was 3.5 sets. So this would count, like I said, lunges and split squats as half sets and other sets as full sets. For muscle growth, also, this fractional volume counting was used, which is how you should count training volume because not all exercises contribute equally to muscle growth.

So for strength development the message is very clearly that you want high intensity, high training frequency and not so much volume. So there’s a limit to how much productive volume you can do per session. After you do, say two heavy sets of deadlifts, your body gets the hint. And if you do additional deadlift sets in that workout, the gains are not that much higher. And we see this also as a drop off in muscle activity level, there’s a drop off in strength, so if you’re training for maximum strength then you want maximum muscle activity levels and maximum force output, and the more fatigued you get, the less every additional set contributes. And that’s a very, very sharp drop off.

Like I said, with this study, it seemed that just two sets per session already contributed the vast majority of your gains, and it’s very clear now in general in the literature that you want to spread out your volume for strength development. If you want to get better at a certain exercise or certain movement you need to do it with a high intensity, high quality of movement, and you want to do that frequently and you don’t need to do that much for volume per session. You do need to do a considerable volume per week, but it’s better to spread it out.

One caveat with this analysis is that I’d like to see this analysis done when controlled for total weekly volume, but I understand this gets messy so that’s kind of a future implication. Overall, though, I think it’s quite intuitive that we also have a maximum productive session volume as opposed to just a maximum productive weekly volume. For one, we see with muscle protein synthesis that there’s just only so much muscle protein synthesis you can stimulate at any one event. We see this with meals as well. There’s a muscle full effect, which sounds like bro-science, but it’s actually the technical term, and it means that there’s only so much muscle protein synthesis you can stimulate in one single meal. And we also see that there’s a limit to how much protein synthesis you can stimulate in one day. That’s why we have limits to how much protein we can consume, for example. Now, this limit to muscle protein synthesis also seems to apply to training volume.

Now the best research we have here is in rodents. I actually think it’s quite applicable because this base type physiology is generally the same in lots of different species, and that’s also why we have mostly similar DNA. You just don’t want to read too much into the exact numbers, but it so happens that in the rodent research we also find a plateau around ten sets. So it’s actually very interesting that that corresponds. Here you can see the graph of how muscle protein synthesis and breakdown increase with a set volume, in rodents, again. By the way – yes you can make rodents do strength training. Researchers have a lot of elaborate ways of making them do exercise for food or basically forced exercise, which is maybe not as nice, but you can make rats do squats, for example, by just putting something on them so that they have to squat. And there are a lot of other ways you can do it.

In any case, you can see that the plateau of muscle protein synthesis occurs at around ten sets. But after that point, there is still an increase in muscle protein breakdown. And we also see this in human research that obviously more volume leads to more muscle protein breakdown and more muscle damage. So it seems that overall there is a certain point after which you don’t get much further protein synthesis, which is the stimulus for muscle growth, but you do get more protein breakdown leading to a plateau in the total net balance or at some point possibly even a negative effect. And this would certainly be junk volume at that point. If the fatigue you’re inducing and the extra protein breakdown and muscle damage is greater than the additional further stimulus for muscle growth, then you actually get worse gains. And that would lead to overreaching and eventually overtraining.

The second reason that there’s likely a limit to how much volume you can productively do in one workout for a muscle group is that you get fatigued. You obviously feel this, there’s dwindling motivation and effort, but even aside from that there’s neuromuscular fatigue. This limits muscle activity levels, this limits force output, so the additional tension you get and the initial amount of reps you can do, they decrease substantially. If you’re doing ten sets of bench presses, which many people do on like a typical national bench press day, you know, three sets of incline, three sets of decline, three sets of flat and then you do dumbbell and whatever… After that ten sets or so or even after six sets there’s not that much additional volume you get compared to the first set. You know, first set you might get ten reps and at some point you have to decrease the weight or you’re doing like sets of maybe five repetitions.

So if you’re doing five repetitions instead of ten, the objective stimulus for muscle growth is half, because we’ve seen research that total accumulated mechanical tension is simply the best driver of muscle growth. And it therefore makes sense just based on the biomechanics and the volume that you get to spread those sets out over the week, move them to a different session. And that I think is also the main takeaway from this research – is that when you start exceeding these thresholds, you probably want to spread that volume out more equally across the week. And it means that many body part splits and bro-splits are probably suboptimal because they limit how much productive volume you can do. You could do 30 sets in one workout, but the gains from that are not going to be that much higher than if you do ten sets.

Now, I would say that the research does not directly mean that there’s a hard plateau. It’s not like – there are no further gains beyond this point, and for every individual it’s going to be 11 sets. No, it’s probably going to vary per individual, per how hard you train, how close to failure you train. Researchers didn’t actually see that in this study, but we can pretty much presume that the volume does change based on how hard you train and individual factors, because everything varies per individual. But the direct classification of the plateau in this case, was that the “Sets no longer had a 50+% probability of exceeding the smallest detectable effect size.” So it’s basically a rather arbitrary convention of saying it’s low likelihood that you get further gains, and if you do, it’s a very, very small addition in gains. So almost a plateau.

In practice I would even say that you don’t want to do 11 sets per muscle per workout. I would do far fewer sets. A previous meta analysis from James Krieger, which was not published, but James is a great statistician, found that the maximum productive volume peaked, and in this case it was a true plateau at just six sets per muscle group per workout. So in general, I would say when you start getting into this range of 6 to 11 sets per muscle group per workout, it’s much better to move that to a different workout because you get more volume, you get higher quality workout, you have more muscle activity, more force output, so you have more mechanical tension per each set in your training program, and it’s just much more efficient in general. Also, this fits with the research that you cannot go wrong with full body training. In every single study that there is – full body workouts provide either essentially the same gains as body part splits, or in multiple studies they provide better gains.

So this research fits with that idea that especially when you do high volume training programs, and especially for more advanced trainees, you want to move your volume, spread it across the week, and the easiest way to do that is just to do full body training. So I hope this helps you with your training program design. If you like this type of evidence base content, I’d be honored if you like and subscribe. If you want to learn absolutely everything there is to know about designing optimized training programs for muscle growth, fat loss, strength development, and general health improvements, check out my online courses. The link is in the description.