Wait a minute, you said 14 sets to look like this guy in 14 sets to look like this guy?
You click baiting son of a bitch. No, actually, it's the truth and there's seven big reasons why.
What's up, guys, Jeff Cavaliere, Athleanx.com. So, you want to build a bigger, stronger chest and you
want to know exactly how many sets to do each week to get the job done best. Well, guess what?
You're in the right place and you're asking the wrong question. You see, you probably shouldn't
be asking that question specifically without asking yourself some other questions first.
And I'm happy to do that for you, because in this video, I'm going to ask those questions of you and
get you the number that you're looking for. And guess what? We're not going to just stop
at chest. With the information that we get from these answers,
you're going to be able to build every muscle in your body just like that. So that being said,
let's start breaking down these questions and getting the answers I need from you right now.
And so, as always, in cases like these, it's oftentimes best to rely on science
and let the science tell us what we should do. But in a question like this,
you're going to be disappointed. Because the recommendation for the number of sets
per muscle group per week to optimize the growth and strength of that muscle is somewhere between
eight and 32 sets. That's not really that helpful. But the reason for this variability
between set recommendations has largely to do with the fact that we need to start asking these
other questions. So, let's get right to it. My first question to you is, are you natural
or are you enhanced? See you guys, you have to cut to the chase if you're using drugs, be it steroids
or TRT, and yes, TRT is included, because most of the time these guys are not taking replacement
dosages, but super physiological dosages and we know that. So, you have to understand that you are
getting a big advantage when it comes to building muscle. You're able to recover at a much faster
rate. When it comes to natural lifting, recovery is everything. If you can't recover from the work
you're doing, you're not going to grow. If you can't recover from the strength work you're doing,
you're not going to get stronger. You have to be able to recover from what you're doing
if you want to see gains. People that are using PEDs are going to be able to do this
a lot easier and faster than you can. They can tolerate higher workloads, greater intensities,
greater volumes and overall greater gains. Guys, listen, ultimately, the choice is yours.
However, I'll tell you that even though it takes more time to achieve the results you're looking
for, naturally. Personally speaking, I can tell you that is much more rewarding and gratifying
when you do it that way. That being said, we do have to make sure we get the other things right.
And it starts with asking you the next question, and that is, what is your experience level?
So, we all know that beginners can pretty much breathe on away and oftentimes see increases in
strength and size. Most of all, because their body simply hasn't been subjected to that stimulus over
and over again, and it hasn't had the chance to sort of become numb to it. That's a good thing.
That means your volumes are going to be lower if you're just starting out. On the other side of
the equation, the advanced lifter has built up a tolerance and has been able to increase the number
of sets and reps that they perform over the course of a week, increasing their weekly volumes.
That being said, as you get stronger and as you start to employ more intensity techniques,
even the advanced lifter has to become a little bit more considerate of the amount of intensity
that they're bringing to their training, which might drop their set totals down for the week.
The bottom line is that your weekly set totals is going to be influenced by your experience
level. And for those beginners out there, it's best to start at that lower end of the range and
simply add sets as your body accommodates to the increased workload. And for those advanced lifters
out there, you're going to be able to experiment with higher and higher weekly set totals. Just be
mindful of the fact that other things matter. Most importantly, what are you training for,
hypertrophy or strength? Because when it comes to strength, your answer is actually going to
be pretty simple because it's guided by your own goal. If you're training for strength,
you know that you need to perform your sets within the three to six rep range, within a certain
intensity level between, let's say, 80% and 85%. And when you can't perform your sets any more
in a given training session within that range, that you really don't have to do any more sets.
And that's going to dictate how many sets you do in a given session that's going to protract
itself out over the course of the week. Now, granted, you might want to do an extra
set or two to continue to work on perfecting your former technique. That's fine. But you
certainly want to continue to do more and more and more and drop the weight more and
more and more because you're not really aligned with your goal anymore. And doing any more of
that is just simply accruing junk volume. So, what you need to do is define what it is that
you're actually training for. If you're training for hypertrophy, well, guess what? The answer
becomes a lot more open-ended and variable. And for that, I have to ask you yet another
question, and that is, how hard are you training? And see, when it comes to making muscle gains,
the amount of volume you use is going to be inversely related to the amount of effort that
you put forth in your workouts. The more effort you put forth, the lower your volume can be.
You can start to veer towards the lower part of that range, 13, 14 sets. If you're going to start
bringing that sub maximal volume, stopping every one of your says, well, short of failure,
you're going to have to start upping the number of sets that you do per week.
And again, I like to sort of go on the other side of it by training intensely. I try to take all of
my sets to failure. When I define failure, I'm talking about form failure. You would still be
able to recognize the exercise I'm doing. I just simply couldn't complete another rep
in good form without bastardizing the movement. If I take each one of those sets to failure,
then I don't have to do as many sets as somebody who likes to stop every set short. Again, science
will show that maybe we don't have to take all of our sets to failure. However, I have a limited
amount of time within which to train, I like to go hard and get out quickly. If you want to do
the same and you can experience games that way. If you want to go completely on the light side
of this, guys, there s even hope for you too. I share this story before about my wife, who has a
set of traps on her that even Brock Lesnar would envy. And the reason for it? She's a barber and
she spends her days like this cutting hair. She's only holding a five-ounce pair of scissors. Oh,
by the way, for six days a week, 10 hours a day. You see, if you're willing to go incredibly high
on the amount of volume that you put forth, you can go incredibly low on the amount of weight
that you lift and ultimately the effort you put forth in your workout. Just be aware that the
more you're willing to leave it all out there on the floor, the less time you're going to have to
spend doing it, because a set cow can come down per workout and ultimately over the course of a
week. And the less you're willing to sort of push yourself on a given set, the more time you're
going to have to spend getting those results. The fact is the decision is yours and which one
you choose is ultimately up to you. But be aware, there are some other factors that might want to
steer you in one direction versus the other. Which brings me to my next question, which is
actually a two part one, and that's how old are you? And do you have any drug related issues?
Because you don't even have to be old to have drug related issues, especially if you have a
history of playing sports. The fact is, though, the answer to that question is going to determine
how many sets you ultimately have to do or may want to do. You see when you're younger and free
of joint related issues, you can actually get away with a lot more volume. As you get older
or start to incur some of those injuries, the situation becomes a lot less forgiving.
You see, when I was younger, I didn't even have to do many warmups sets to get myself ready to do a
bench press. But now I have to actually prepare myself to do that. But here's the good thing,
your body is actually far less susceptible to the stress of the load as it is to the number
of times that you're lifting the load. So, if I were to put, let's say, 185 pounds in the
bar and lift it versus 225 pounds in the bar and lift it, that's not necessarily the straw that's
going to break the camel's back when it comes to the issue, you're having your shoulder or
the inflammation you're having your shoulder. It s the number of times that you perform that
doing 80 repetitions over the course of many more sets versus 20 or 30 repetitions over far
fewer sets it's going to be ultimately the thing that saves your shoulder from the inflammation
and the thing that keeps you in the gym. Because ultimately, if that injury becomes
so inflamed that you can no longer do your work as then you're accruing
zero volume and making zero gains. So, this is a case where actually doing less equals more in the
long run and it's actually related to my next question, which is a very important one.
And that is, are you actually recovered from your training? Because whether or not you're
training for a bigger chest or a stronger chest or really any muscle, for that matter,
you're only as good as your body's ability to recover from the last workout and be prepared
for the next workout. And when I m talking about next, I'm not just talking about the next workout,
I'm talking about every next workout. Because your goal should always be improvement in some way,
shape or form. If you're training for strength, are you able to continue to add weight to the bar
or has the last session left you in a place where you actually can't do that anymore? Because if it
has, you need to revisit the volume that you're performing right now and make decreases to that.
From a hypertrophy standpoint, if the next workout is actually impaired by the soreness that you
created in this workout, then you need to not only consider the volumes that you're doing right now,
but also the techniques you're using, which actually brings me to my last question.
And that is, what exercises are you actually performing and how are you performing them?
Because all that matters as well. You see, if your chest workout consists of bench
press and let's say heavy weight, it dips versus crossovers and bench flies don't do bench flies,
by the way the requirements for getting the job done are going to vary dramatically. And that's
because those single joint exercises are going to oftentimes be performed with much lighter weights,
which you're going to require additional volume to get that stress required to produce muscle growth.
At the same point, those compound exercises that are much more taxing and demanding on the body
that lend themselves to more progressive overload and strength are going to ultimately bring that
set count down because you're able to induce more results at a quicker, faster pace. Not to mention,
as I said, the way you perform these sets would matter as well for the reasons we just talked
about before. If you're using eccentric muscle overload, because let's say you've tapped out
all of your available strength gains at the moment on an exercise, we know we can induce more muscle
growth, but at what cost? We'd have to make sure that we're allowing for more recovery from
those additional stresses, from eccentric muscle damage to make sure we keep those gains coming.
And all of this now comes around to formulate one final question that
you probably should be asking me right now. And I know you're probably thinking, Jeff,
if I know how many steps I'm supposed to do in a week, how can I ultimately split that up n the
case of the chest to make sure I get the job done the right way? I m happy to answer it for you.
So now considering everything we've learned in the fact that the general consensus within this
broad range of eight to 32 says with the available science we have is that somewhere between 15 and
18 sets is sort of the safe place to start. We want to make those changes either up or down based
on the answer to your questions. And when we take an example like the chest, we're going to say,
how do they now fit into an overall training week based on some different types of splits you might
be following? So, if we took basically a push pull leg split we would have, let's say, our push day
falling on the second day of the cycle, so pull, push and legs with off day coming back, pull,
push and legs. So, on the first push day, you hit your big exercise like your bench press,
and you do it for three to five sets. You come up with a secondary chest
exercise and that would be for three sets. When you come back here the second time, we have
three exercises we could put in here. Because we could basically say, hey, let's change the focus
of our big strength exercise to an overhead press and then just come in and fill in the gaps
with some secondary chest exercises. Three of them for three sets apiece. Again,
that puts you at nine sets and eight sets, around 17 sets for that type of split.
Now, if you follow a total body split, now we have set where we set up a Monday, Wednesday and Friday
workout schedule. And again, total body, meaning going to do everything in one particular workout.
So here for our pushing part of the workout, we're going to want to train our shoulders,
are going to want to train our triceps. We're going to hit our chest likely here with a big
exercise. It might even come back again with a secondary, fairly big exercise, like a dip. So,
you have a bench press for three to four sets or three to five sets and then you have a weighted
dip coming in here. On the next time that we do the push you can just come in with two accessory
type exercises for the chest here, just for additional volume and just to continue to push
those hypertrophy gains with that 48 hour re hitting again of that same muscle group.
And then we come in 48 hours later, one more time and we can go back to the original exercise if we
so choose, in this case, the bench press again. But all we have to do is the bench press and we
can hit some more shoulder and tricep work when we're talking about additional volume,
trying to bring up the overall pushing aspect of our upper body.
And then we have to at least revisit this and this the bro split. And you might be wondering
and maybe even understand by this point whether the bro split actually can work. And I talk about
a dumb bro split and a smart bro split. And a smart bro split, basically realizing that,
yeah, we're going to train chest on Monday, International Chest Day, and we're going to pick
four or five exercises for three sets a piece, which puts us at about 15 sets right there.
But if we know that we can hit them indirectly again, we can hit the chest again and directly
through the exercises we choose for triceps. Maybe you do some sort of push up variation,
a cobra pushup for your triceps or you do some sort of a dip. We know we're going to indirectly
hit the chest again and we're going to pick up some additional volume through those two
exercises. And then we go through a leg workout, and we come back and hit the shoulders again.
So now we're kind of hitting the pushing aspect of it every other day and shoulder day again,
depending upon the exercises you choose, even in overhead press is going to hit the upper chest
or some variation, again, of a push up. We had the opportunity to do this. And you can
see that we're restimulating that muscle every 48 hours, but we're also hitting it indirectly,
even though we're putting the bulk of that workload on this one day. Not saying this
is the best, I'm just saying that this is a way that bro splits could actually work as well.
The fact is, when it comes to popular questions like this in regard to training, guys,
there's never a clear-cut answer. It always sort of resides in the gray where a lot of different
factors matter, and particularly when you want to get the best results for you and you specifically,
those considerations have to be made. If you're looking for programs guys that put
the science back in strength and consider all of these elements and prescribing the workouts that
you do. Make sure you head over to athleanx.com and pick up one of our Athlean-X programs. Also,
if you find the video helpful, make sure you leave your comments and thumbs up below and what other
questions can I answer for you in a future video? I'll make sure I do that for you.
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