How many sets per muscle per week

Weekly hard sets per muscle is the figure that decides whether a block works. Start with the counting, because the landmarks are meaningless if the count is wrong.

What counts as a set

A working set counts. That is a set taken close enough to failure to be a stimulus — in practice, within about 4 reps of it.

A warmup counts for nothing. Not partially, not at a discount. Zero.

A drop set, back-off, myo-rep or cluster is real work and belongs in your tonnage. It extends the set it hangs off rather than adding one. Count it as volume.

Four working sets of chest press with a drop on each is four hard sets, not eight. Treating it as eight is how people end up convinced they are doing 24 sets a week for a muscle that is getting 12.

The other counting trap is indirect work. Rows train biceps. Presses train triceps and front delts. A fractional count is a made-up number either way, so pick a convention and hold it. The point of the figure is comparing this week to last week.

The landmarks

Four thresholds, per muscle, per week. They come out of the hypertrophy literature via Mike Israetel’s framing, and the useful thing about them is that they define a range, not a target.

• MV. Maintenance volume. Enough to hold what you have. Where you sit in a deload or a busy month.
• MEV. Minimum effective volume. Below this, you are maintaining rather than growing.
• MAV. Maximum adaptive volume. The productive middle. Most of a block is spent here.
• MRV. Maximum recoverable volume. Past this you accumulate fatigue faster than you adapt to it.

Rough per-week figures for an intermediate lifter, which will not be your figures:

Treat these as a starting position. Your MRV for a muscle moves with sleep, stress, training age, how many other muscles are near their own ceiling, and how hard your sets actually are. The number is personal and it drifts.

Adding sets is a stronger lever than adding load

This is the part that gets missed by anyone running a purely load-based progression.

The dose-response work on sets and hypertrophy points the same way each time it is redone. More weekly sets produce more growth, and the returns flatten without reversing across the range most people train in: on the order of a fraction of a percent per additional weekly set around 12 sets, still climbing past it. Programmes that add sets across a block beat programmes that hold the count constant.

So a muscle sitting under its MEV needs another set, on a lift that is already going well. Not a heavier bar.

Which lift matters. Adding volume to a movement you are about to back off makes a bad week worse. Put the set on something the log says is progressing: a lift where the load just went up, or one where you are chasing reps inside the range. Break ties toward the lift carrying the fewest sets, so the work spreads instead of stacking on one exercise.

Six workouts, seven days

If you run a fixed weekly split, your weekly volume is the sum of what is programmed. A rotation is six workouts in an order, trained whenever you train, and the per-rotation sum is not your weekly figure. Reading it as one understates every muscle.

The correction is arithmetic:

weekly sets = sets per rotation × (sessions per week ÷ workouts in rotation)

Six workouts trained daily is 7 ÷ 6 = 1.167. Every muscle in that plan is getting 17% more than the template appears to say. That is enough to hide a muscle sitting past MRV, which is the one thing this whole exercise exists to catch.

The muscle at zero

The most common real finding is a muscle at zero, not a muscle past MRV.

Calves, rear delts, hamstrings on a quad-dominant rotation. They do not show up in a summary of what you trained, because they were not trained. Any volume report that lists only the muscles with sets in them makes the one case worth seeing the only invisible one. List every muscle, including the empty ones.

Where to start

If you have never counted: log four weeks with warmups excluded and drops counted as volume rather than sets, then read your per-muscle totals. Most people are surprised in both directions at once: over on chest and biceps, under on hamstrings and rear delts.

Then move one muscle at a time, one or two sets at a time. Give it three weeks before deciding.

Where this comes from

The dose-response relationship between weekly sets and hypertrophy is Schoenfeld, Ogborn and Krieger (2017, Journal of Sports Sciences), revisited in the set-volume review by Baz-Valle and colleagues (2022, Journal of Human Kinetics). The MV / MEV / MAV / MRV framing and the per-muscle figures are Israetel and colleagues’ volume landmarks, from Scientific Principles of Hypertrophy Training. The numbers in the table above are the app’s own defaults, which sit inside those published ranges.