The Motor Unit

My last post dealt with the different training approaches to build muscle - full body training (my favorite), upper body and lower body split, push-pull-legs split, and body part split. In terms of muscle-building potential, they’re all just as capable provided the trainee sticks to it consistently.

Once you settle on the training split, the next step is to land on the weekly sets and reps scheme per muscle group, i.e., the weekly volume required to build muscle.

A research paper¹ published in 2022 compared three different weekly volume ranges to find out which range yielded the most growth. The ranges were

1. Low volume (< 12 sets)

2. Medium volume (12 to 20 sets)

3. High volume (>20 sets)

The sets across all these were “hard sets”, meaning the repetitions in each set were taken close to failure, which is very important to induce muscle growth. If you were to do just repetitions in each set with a weight that allows you to go for 15 repetitions, then it would hardly help. However, if you were to do the same 5 repetitions with a weight that allows you to do just 5 to 6 repetitions, then you’re training close to failure and that is what we want to induce hypertrophy.

The study concluded that the medium volume range with each set taken close to failure was the optimal range but with the triceps muscle group, the optimal volume was greater than 20 sets. The study added that since the triceps muscles are already involved in compound pressing/pushing exercises like the bench press and shoulder press, the weekly volume can be held at just the medium volume ranges to target the triceps.

In conclusion, regardless of what type of training routine you like, as long as you’re consistently performing 12 to 20 weekly sets per muscle group with repetitions in each set taken close to failure, you will induce muscle growth.

1. Baz-Valle, Eneko & Balsalobre-Fernández, Carlos & Alix-Fages, Carlos & Santos-Concejero, Jordan. (2022). A Systematic Review of The Effects of Different Resistance Training Volumes on Muscle Hypertrophy. Journal of Human Kinetics. 81. 199-210. 10.2478/hukin-2022-0017.