#003 Choosing the right Sets & Reps

As always, in the Boats & Logs Lifting Club, we try to zoom out first to understand the bigger picture and then discuss details and nuances. The truth is, if you follow some simple guidelines, you will receive quite equal hypertrophy results, no matter how many sets and reps you are doing. But let’s start from the beginning.

How many sets do you need?

Contrary to what you may think, the most important part of hypertrophy is how many sets you do for each major body part (back, chest, hamstrings, quads/glutes) per week and not how many sets you do per exercise. Assuming we are training at a high intensity where we are taking our sets to or near failure, science argues that you should train in the range of 10 - 20 sets per week.

Before we dive into how many sets you should most likely do, it is really important for you to understand that there is no linear correlation between sets per week and muscle growth, as you can see in the chart above. Going from 5 to 10 sets per week will provide significant additional muscle growth. If you add 5 more sets per week (so you are doing 15), the additional benefit will greatly diminish. Yes, you will most likely make more gains doing 15 sets per body part each week compared to doing 10 sets, but the difference will not be huge. Let’s say you are super motivated and add 10 more sets per body part each week (25 sets now); chances are you are making less gains than you would do with 15 sets per week.

These additional sets that provide no added hypertrophy or might even be damaging are referred to as “junk volume”. You should always try to avoid these unnecessary reps for multiple reasons. First of all, they will provide little to no additional hypertrophy benefits. In the worst case, your muscles will be overtrained and may even lose some size. Additionally, junk volume increases the recovery your muscle needs, putting more stress on your body and increasing the risk of injury. And lastly, junk volume takes away the energy from your next exercises, causing you to leave gains on the table.

Coming back to our range of 10-20 sets per week, beginners and intermediates should train around 10-12 sets per week instead of going up to 20. The main reason here is that 10 sets will already bring most lifters in their first years quite close to their natural growth limit, as they usually don’t require much volume to grow. So, doing more than 12 sets per body part as a beginner or intermediate will have a very limited upside. A further reason to start at the lower end of the range is that you leave yourself room to increase the volume while you progress in the gym. If you already start out training at around 20 sets per week, you don’t have that lever later on.

Matching the sets and reps

Many people try to make a science out of rep ranges when rep ranges really are way less important than people think. While most people are discussing doing 8, 9, 10, 12, or 15 reps, in practice, this decision will have very little impact on your gains.