Finding Your Optimal Resistance Training Volume
How much, how heavy, and for how long?
No matter what your goals are in or outside of the gym, finding the right dose for your training is crucial to get you to see progress. What’s the minimum volume you can do and still see an adaptation? What’s the most intensity you can handle without affecting your recovery? Are you training for pure strength, muscle endurance, or hypertrophy?
Over the past few decades, many studies have gathered unanimous evidence surrounding appropriate training volume and intensity for specific strength goals. While some coaches may have a bit of a more unorthodox approach to getting results for their clients and athletes (they’re often exceptions, not the rule), you’ll always find the same three criteria involved in creating a complete resistance training program. Repetitions, amount of sets performed, and the load you’re using for each exercise. Each of these criteria needs to be tailored to suit the individual’s goals or they may find themselves regressing or not seeing any results at all. All three go hand in hand!
Now, let’s dive into it.
If you’re training for…
Pure and maximal strength
What’s the load you’ll be working at?
When it comes to maximal strength, there’s more to it than just maxing out each lift every time you step into the gym. Whether you’re an Olympic weightlifter, powerlifter, or regular gym-goer, you’re probably familiar with the feeling of a lift that is 100% your max—lights out, nothing left in the tank. Most of the time, these lifters are only training with this level of intensity for a very short period of time. They’ll be lifting above 85% more frequently which creates more demand on the nervous system. This style of training is primarily about neural adaptation. It’s getting your brain and body to work together and produce as much force as possible in a coordinated manner. Training for maximal strength requires a long-term approach and strategy which is why these lifters will only be training at these loads periodically.
How many sets and reps will you be doing?
During these training phases, lifters can be performing anything between 1-10 sets of 1-5reps in order to get the adaptation they’re looking for. Depending on the lifter’s current strength level and ability to recover during their session, it could be on the lower or higher end of the scale. Factors such as age, gender, and overall health can also play a huge role in determining appropriate volume but for now, let’s use an example of a typical novice lifter. At the start of their training block, they might be starting around doubles or triples at 85% and could eventually build up to triples at 90%. A more advanced lifter might go even as far as peaking for a 5RM! However, what’s more, important to look at while training at sub-maximal intensities is the total volume accumulated (sets x reps).
Keep in mind that as the lifter evolves and matures through their training, they will start to understand what their body can recover from—not just muscularly but more so in terms of what their nervous system can handle.
Muscle Strength & Hypertrophy
What’s the load you’ll be working at?
This is the category that most of the population that’s interested in basic resistance training falls into. Gaining some strength along with some hypertrophy effect (aka muscle building). Training between 70-80% gives you enough room to play with higher or lower rep ranges without impacting your overall recovery (ie. delayed onset muscle soreness, decreased power output, and decreased contractile ability). There’s also a time and place for lifters training for maximal strength (like the ones mentioned above) to incorporate rep schemes and intensities within these ranges. During the start of a mesocycle, they will see most of their work done within the ranges of 70%, 75%, and 80% to build a base of muscular strength to support the 90%+ loads they’ll be moving later on in their training. It’s not to say you won’t be pushing “as hard” during your training. These percentages are easier to recover from which allows you to accumulate more volume in the end.
How many sets and reps will you be doing?
Given the working weights lifters will be using in their training, it’s more doable to accumulate to 3-5 sets of 5-10 reps. Again, depending on the intensity itself, this will determine what volume will be prescribed. Lighter weights allow you to perform sets within the 8-10 range while sets of 5-8 could be slightly heavier but for a lower total volume. Another consideration that can impact the sets and reps prescribed is the movement itself or targetted muscle groups. Given what we know about how certain muscle fibre types respond to different stimuli, it makes sense that lower reps would improve maximal strength. Fast-twitch fibres respond best to lower reps at a submaximal weight while slow-twitch fibers are most likely to respond to reps between 15 to 30 at lower loads. This is why you’ll often see movements such as bicep curls and tricep extensions programmed with higher repetitions and a barbell squat will be prescribed with lower repetitions (5 or less per set).
It’s worth noting that while you can absolutely do sets of 10 for a barbell squat or sets of 3 for a bicep curl, there’s a science behind the appropriate volume & load for each due to the nature of these movements, muscle grups involved and how they challenge your overall structure. A barbell squat is a compound movement which requires more stability, neural drive and involvement of other muscle groups that aren’t the primary mover. A bicep curl is an isolation movement that involves minimal effort from the rest of your muscles in order to perform a repetition.
Muscle Endurance & Hypertrophy
What’s the load you’ll be working at?
When you’re solely looking to pack on as much lean mass as you can, lower weights performed at very high repetitions will give you the appropriate stimulus for this specific training goal. Intensities between 55-70% won’t tax your nervous system as much, but it will allow your body the energy it needs to recover from training-induced muscle damage. Since these loads are lighter than the maximal strength group and the muscle strength & hypertrophy group, lifters will also notice adaptations to different muscle fibre types. Type 1 muscle fibres fatigue less quickly but they don’t have a high power output. So while training them with a volume-like approach will help increase their size and density, you may also see some changes in your muscular endurance (being able to do more work over a longer period of time). This adaptation can be attested to the number of sets and reps performed in a given session.
How many sets and reps will you be doing?
Doing anything less than 10 reps per set at a 55-65% intensity hasn’t proven much in terms of increasing muscle size and endurance. Accumulating enough volume is necessary to see any changes in adaptation when training at these lower intensities. Sets of 15-30 reps will challenge the muscle groups you’re targeting in a very specific way that will induce the release of metabolites that contribute to hypertrophy and muscle growth. Pairing these higher rep sets with minimal rest and repeated quality efforts over the course of each set will yield great results in both your muscle endurance and muscle size.
Where to go from here?
Resistance training has many “rules” but many of them are broken, bent, and adjusted based on each unique individual. The principles discussed above can be used as a guide to help you tailor your programming based on what we know from studying exercise science.
There’s no perfect plan to follow and there’s no magic recipe to getting you the results you want.
The bottom line is that when it comes to your training, it’s your consistent efforts applied over the course of a long period of time (we’re talking months, not weeks or days) that will tell you whether not you’re on the right track.
Studies used as references for this article:
Schoenfeld BJ, Grgic J, Van Every DW, Plotkin DL. Loading Recommendations for Muscle Strength, Hypertrophy, and Local Endurance: A Re-Examination of the Repetition Continuum. Sports (Basel). 2021 Feb 22;9(2):32. doi: 10.3390/sports9020032. PMID: 33671664; PMCID: PMC7927075.
Sale DG. Neural adaptation to resistance training. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 1988 Oct;20(5 Suppl):S135-45. doi: 10.1249/00005768-198810001-00009. PMID: 3057313.
Krzysztofik M, Wilk M, Wojdała G, Gołaś A. Maximizing Muscle Hypertrophy: A Systematic Review of Advanced Resistance Training Techniques and Methods. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2019 Dec 4;16(24):4897. doi: 10.3390/ijerph16244897. PMID: 31817252; PMCID: PMC6950543.
Plotkin DL, Roberts MD, Haun CT, Schoenfeld BJ. Muscle Fiber Type Transitions with Exercise Training: Shifting Perspectives. Sports (Basel). 2021 Sep 10;9(9):127. doi: 10.3390/sports9090127. PMID: 34564332; PMCID: PMC8473039.