Everyone knows that training volume —the number of sets per muscle group—has a ceiling. If you go beyond that, the sets will no longer yield extra muscle growth. But what about the number of sets per muscle group per workout ? New research, a meta-analysis of no fewer than 67 studies, provides the answer.

In the analysis, a higher volume led to better results, but the additional return diminished as the volume increased further. After 11 effective sets per muscle group, extra sets yielded hardly any additional growth. In other words, the maximum productive training volume is around 11 sets.

This aligns with advice we already gave in 2019, namely to do no more than 5-10 sets per muscle group per training session. And following from that: increase your training frequency as soon as you reach the threshold of 10 sets per muscle group per training session.

After about 5 sets, the efficiency starts to decrease sharply, to stagnate around 10 sets.

Keep in mind that these are not strict limits, where anything above that is by definition ‘junk volume’. A (slightly) higher volume per session can therefore still contribute to your progress, but it is probably wiser to move those extra sets to another training session.