How to Train for Muscle Growth: Beginner to Advanced Training
In a Nutshell
Beginners should train 2-4 times weekly with full-body sessions using basic compound lifts in the 5-10 rep range, focusing on technique and slow progression. Intermediates need more volume and frequency across 3-6 sessions, experimenting with exercises and rep ranges to identify what works best for their body. Advanced lifters must specialize with high volumes (20-35+ sets per muscle), precise exercise and rep range selection based on years of data, and strategic deprioritization of some muscle groups to manage recovery.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
There is no distinct day that you graduate from beginner to intermediate or intermediate to advanced. The longer you train, the more your training should look more intermediate, and then the more your training should look more advanced. It is really sad when someone calls themselves advanced but does every exercise wrong. Advanced lifters make slow gains. They do not make very rapid gains anymore in most cases. If you can maintain beginner results with beginner volumes, do not go do intermediate training. Do not rush through the process. Instead, milk each stage.
If you want the most muscle growth long-term, you should be training differently if you're a beginner, intermediate, or advanced. If you just want as much muscle as possible in the near term, just train a ton. That could get you hurt. It could sabotage your gains for later. If you want the best long-term gains, listen up.
A beginner is someone who's trained between zero and about 2 years of consistent training. An intermediate is someone who's trained something like 3 to 6 years of consistent training, meaning they don't miss more than 2 to 3 weeks at a time in their program. An advanced lifter is someone who's been training for 7 years or more. These are very fungible, very average definitions just to get a good vibe.
How we determine how beginners versus intermediates versus advanced folks should train differently is by using a combination of constraints and affordances. Constraints are things that get in the way of some of these groups of people, but not others. Affordances are things some groups can get away with and benefit from, while other groups cannot. Whatever passes the filters of stuff you can do versus stuff you can't do ends up being a fairly good recommendation and a likely good way to train if you're a beginner, intermediate, or advanced. Beginners versus intermediates versus advanced lifters have actually quite large differences in many cases between their constraints and their affordances.
Beginners have minimal technique knowledge. If you say do a squat, they don't know what that is. If they do a squat, it's usually all kinds of wrong because they don't know how to do it well. Beginners have a high need for technique reinforcement during sets because learning technique builds the foundation for the rest of the training career. Beginner is when you learn how to do exercises properly, and you will have that knowledge inculcated into you for the rest of your life. After that, everything is smooth sailing technique-wise.
Beginners need practice at a few simple moves because the constraint there is they can become overwhelmed. If you teach a beginner five exercises in one day, that could be overkill. Maybe three is better. If you teach them four exercises for a single muscle group, they just start confusing a ton of stuff.
Beginners also have kind of not so great core strength and coordination under heavy loads. When you give them anything heavy, they start wobbling. That constraint is going to have to inform how much weight we use. In addition, super heavy weights lead beginners to go into fight or flight mode and have technique breakdown. You can show a beginner how to do a stiff leg deadlift, but if you do it for sets of four or three reps or something like that, each rep is so heavy that the next rep the person's just trying to survive. They round their back, they bend their knees, and it's not really a stiff leg deadlift anymore. More advanced folks will be able to keep a steady technique under really challenging loads, beginners not as dependably.
For very high reps, sets of 10 and more, beginners get so fatigued and the pain of the burn gets so intense, their technique also breaks down at higher reps. So technique breaks down at low reps and at high reps. Beginners are very, very bad at estimating reps in reserve, how close to failure they are. So a program with reps in reserve guidance just doesn't really work super well for beginners because they stop at either six reps in reserve or they go all the way to failure.
Beginners do not need high volumes to grow. They can grow from very small amounts of volume, which is really cool because you can structure the plan very differently. Beginners can train multiple muscles with great effect for each muscle just with distributed compounds. If you're advanced and you're going to want to work your chest and your triceps, probably have to do some chest work like wide grip bench, probably have to do some tricep work like skull crushers. But for a beginner, because they don't need a ton of volume and every exercise is super novel and super growth promoting for them, they can do what's called distributed compounds, which means compounds that distribute the load and thus the effort to multiple muscles as opposed to focus compounds, which are just technically compound like a wide grip bench, but really just focus on one thing like the pecs for example. So with a beginner, you can give them some close grip benches, and for them, that's a really good triceps stimulus and a good chest stimulus. And because they don't need high volumes to grow, just a few sets of close grip bench could be all the chest and triceps work a beginner needs in a given program.
Beginners also don't need a lot of variation in exercises and in rep ranges because of the newbie effect. They just don't need a lot of variation in anything. You can just only do squats for 6 months as a beginner and your legs grow phenomenally. If you just did only 6 months of squats as an advanced lifter, you might squat your back and knees into different planetary orbits and have not as much leg growth to show for it at the end of the day because you need more variation to stay in one piece and to get your best gains. Another piece of good news for beginners is they need only basic progression with no highly detailed estimates of reps in reserve required. Just doing a little bit more every now and again is good enough progression logic for beginners.
Beginners can do as few as two sessions per week because they can learn technique and grow muscle from just two sessions a week. A lot of times that's really good because it doesn't overwhelm them and cause burnout. If you give beginners a 5-day week program, half of them won't show up on week number three. Give them a 2-day week program, more of them show up.
In the first few weeks of beginner training, it's a good idea to use super light loads that are very far from being challenging, never mind failure, just to work on establishing proper technique for sets of about five reps each set. A couple sets of each exercise, five reps nice and easy because beginners are completely new to training. Just from very light work of technical work, they will get sore and they will grow. You can be eight reps in reserve for all of these sets and grow like crazy as a beginner because beginners grow like crazy and there's no rush.
After the first week or two of establishing basic technique, you can start to have the ladder sets. If you do three sets per exercise, the last set of each exercise can be not just a practice set of five like eight or 10 reps in reserve, it can now be like a two reps in reserve. Now as a coach, you know that and if you're a beginner listening to that, that just means the bar starts to feel really heavy and tough towards the end of those reps of whatever number of those sets of whatever number of reps that you're doing. So now we go from a program in the first few weeks of everything is light to the last sets of each exercise are kind of heavy and then in week three, four, five, it all gets replaced with every set is pretty heavy and pretty challenging, but good technique never ever leaves, it's always right.
The best rep range for beginners is the five to 10 rep range like sets of eight on average. That gives you enough practice and enough growth stimulus to get really good at technique and grow. But not so many reps that autopilot and pain avoidance kick in and your technique degrades and not so ultra heavy sets of three or four that your technique will degrade and you might get hurt. You still warm up. But one or two sets of warm-ups before each exercise in week six plus of the program and then every other set after that is going to be a tough working set.
If you're coaching beginners or if you're a beginner yourself and you have to tell yourself cues, remind yourself knees out on the squat, etc., just one to two cues per exercise and even per set is a good idea. You start lobbing eight cues per set at a beginner, they don't know what to correct and it's too confusing. Remember, the bandwidth they have is really tiny anyway because it's all new for them and they're under pain and duress of lifting really hard. So just one or two corrections like knees out knees out knees out, you're good. That is good enough and over time slowly you can give more corrections, not per set, but over time, one week you do a lot of correcting for the back, another week you do a lot of correcting for the heels, and so on and so on and so on.
Technique improvement, technique stabilization of good technique is a huge deal, which is why queuing is massively required. If the individual is pretty easily completing multiple sets of five to 10 reps with what looks like not so much effort and the bar is not slowing down and they're like, dude, I can do more, then you can add five to 10 lbs to the lift and you can do this every week, potentially every other week, as soon as the beginner lifter seems not to be overly challenged by the sets, increasing load is a good idea.
After the first few months of probably lifting no more than about twice a week, if this individual, or if that's you, are really loving the process, really loving the results, and have extra bandwidth, you can move up to three and then eventually four sessions per week for the next several years of your beginner training career. More than four as a beginner is probably like overkill, you can get amazing gains from four and save all your psychotic motivation for later when you're intermediate, when you really need it. But don't rush. Not a good idea to get beginners to come in and do four sessions every week right off hand. Better idea to get them to come in and do two sessions a week, and then if they really love it a few months later, if they're still around, you can bump them to three and then eventually four sessions a week.
Every session that beginners do, pretty much, on average, should be whole body, upper and lower, all the major muscle groups, and mostly distributed compound. That means you might have like four to six exercises, but all of them train multiple muscle groups such that you get the whole body trained every single time. Ideally, you're going to use free weights, barbells, dumbbells, and body weight exercises mostly or really only to imprint the neural patterns of basic movements like presses, rows, curls, hinges, etc. under your own stabilization. The way to become a long-term the best lifter you can be is to do things yourself. If you have a trainer groping you the entire time and helping you arc through the movement, you're getting ripped off. The trainer likes it because they get to touch you, and that's nice. Maybe they have nobody else in their life that they can touch. Real talk. You want to become competent at the basic movements. When you do that, you're going to be ready to do every single other fancy machine in the gym, which you will get to do as an intermediate.
In summary, two to four sessions of whole body lifting per week with mostly distributed compound exercises. Two to five sets per exercise on average. Start at two, and if you can handle more volume and you're not super sore week, slowly work up to five. About four to six exercises per session is typically good. Many more than that's not ideal. Sets of five to 10 reps is really good, challenging, but not crazy. And you can pick some exercises and run the same identical exercises for months on end because you need to learn them really well, and variation is just not a big factor for beginners. You could probably repeat the exercises you do at early in the week later in the week. Just change the rep range slightly by changing the load. So maybe five or 10 or 20 lbs difference, maybe 30 lbs difference in some exercises in the load, so that in the first day of the week, you do about sets of five to seven reps, tough, heavier, and then you lighten the load a little bit so that later in the week, you're doing sets of about eight to 10 reps. Same exercises, same execution. That means you get practice twice at the same movement. After three or four months of the same movement, you really know those movements super well. Then you can change them to slightly different movements, still distributed compounds, like from a close grip bench to an incline close grip or something like that. And then you can continue to reproduce that process. Do not worry about how hard you're training. Just add weight to the bar if the bar stops slowing down altogether in sets of five to 10 as you master that five to 10 rep range. Technique, technique, technique. If you trained a little bit not hard enough, but your technique is amazing and solid, I would much prefer that entering the intermediate phase than having trained too hard, but literally learned the wrong technique. The thing about technique is it's not terribly difficult to learn good technique, but it is terribly difficult to unlearn bad technique. So making sure you train nice and hard, nice and heavy, really emphasizing good technique is number one.
Intermediates can't really estimate reps in reserve super well yet. They don't really practice it much with their beginner stages, so why would they? They also don't really know which exercise they respond better to or worse to. It cracks me up every time when someone has been training for two years is like, man, I seem to respond better to squats than to leg press. Like, and you know that how? Like, well, and vibes, man. Like, dope, vibes are great. The mind-muscle connection is not a reliable proxy for early intermediates because they basically are beginners at the end of their beginner journey. So, it's not a variable that we can use. Another constraint is that intermediates need more effort, more volume, and more frequency than beginners do to make their best gains. Your body's pretty well adapted now. It needs more to grow.
Intermediates have some upsides. They can demonstrate good technique all on their own. If you can't demonstrate good technique all on your own, you're kind of a beginner still no matter what you say. They have often, ideally, mastered the core barbell, dumbbell, and basic bodyweight exercise. If you claim to be an intermediate and I ask you to do push-ups, you'd better show me how to do push-ups relatively well. If they suck, I'm skeptical. Beginners also get tired real easily and take a long time to recover because everything's such a big shock to them. But intermediates have the work capacity to now train three, four, five, or even six times per week, allowing them to have the higher frequency and volume that they so desperately need to grow their best. And here's the really cool thing about intermediates: they survived the beginner phase, which means they're lifers now. They're in. And that means they have the motivation to train hard and often and for long durations at a time per session to make their best gains.
For intermediates, train with all exercises in the gym for one to three mesocycles at a time at least to see where and how your responses proceed as you train through literally every exercise. In one program, pick a bunch of exercises, train them for one to three months or so, or one to three mesocycles, maybe up to four months, and then switch exercises, pick tons of other ones. Intermediate training is amazing. It's kind of like Halloween. You get a bunch of different kind of candy. Intermediate training is you want to use every exercise and every machine at least for one mesocycle to see if it works well for you. Loads of fun.
What you're looking at is pumps. For any given number of sets, does this machine or this exercise or this repetition range give me good pumps? How much soreness does it give me? How much can I feel the tension of the target muscle in this exercise? How much do I feel the burn in higher reps from this exercise in the target muscle? How much local fatigue do I get after I do skull crushers? Are my triceps feeling like super tired or they feel pretty okay? And how much joint comfort and discomfort am I feeling? Do dips shred my elbows or are they really amazing for my elbows? See where these are maximized and minimized. And it's not just exercises. You want to train through the entire repetition spectrum. So you are going to have opportunities, not necessarily in the same session, though you could, not necessarily even in the same mesocycle, though you could, same week. Over the course of your intermediate times, give most exercises a shot with most rep ranges, which means you're going to do some training cycles where some exercises you're going to train often in the 5 to 10 rep range. Sometimes you're going to train in the 10 to 20 rep range. Sometimes in the 20 to 30 rep range for the same exercise. Often times in different mesocycles or different times of the week or you train a couple sets in the 5 to 10 and then a couple sets in the 10 to 20, something like that. You want to see where pumps and soreness and joint stuff, all that stuff is maximized and minimized in the intersection of exercise and rep range, which is a big deal. What you're going to learn from this to prepare you to be advanced is where your body best responds to a given exercise and rep range. Because that is going to put an X exactly on where you want to spend most of your advanced time.
Volume-wise, train with between 5 and 15 sets per muscle per week. That could be biceps for five sets total in the week or it could be biceps for 15 sets total in the week. Spread these over one to two exercises per muscle per session. So you might do like one bicep curl exercise and two quad exercises or something like that. But definitely not three or four or five exercises for a muscle in any given session. Train from anywhere between three to six sessions per week, probably starting your intermediate phase closer to three or four, and then eventually, if you'd like, getting up close to five and six. Spend for optimal gains about 1 to 1 and 1/2 hours in each session working diligently with no more than about 2 minutes rest between sets, often a minute or less. It's going to smash that volume in that you need.
Most intermediates should train all of their muscles evenly. This is for the most long-term growth to be the most jackedest when you're advanced. You can prioritize as an intermediate, but like if you have okay biceps and not so great pecs, you prioritize then you're later going to have pretty good biceps, but very meh pecs. If you train everything evenly, you can find out what the genetic strengths and weaknesses you have are, and also bring everything up to at least a decent standard.
As an intermediate, push each working set hard and get a feel for how tough three reps, two reps, one rep, zero reps in reserve, and actual failure feel. Do this by guessing your three reps in reserve estimate, so you put what you think is your 15 rep max on the bar and like I think 12 is going to get me there and you just go and you kind of stop at 12 or you say ah 12 was kind of easy I'm going to stop at 13 or 14. Just your best guess. And then every single time that you come back through that whole mesocycle, you're probably going to add a rep or about 5 lb to that exercise. And you're going to do however many match your reps or match the total amount of weight and just do one more rep every time. That increased challenge through the mesocycle will eventually lead you to go to zero RIR or failure and then you'll know how good your estimate was of three RIR. If you start an exercise you thought was three RIR, but then at the end you actually have to put like 40 more pounds onto the exercise or do 16 more reps to get to failure, it wasn't three RIR probably. It was more like eight to begin with and now you know that you can go a little harder next meso. If you start at what you think was three RIR, but you hit failure by session number two and even fewer reps, you definitely just did like pretty much failure in that first one. That is not three reps in reserve. It's a big deal to learn how to go hard.
You're going to need to go hard when you're advanced, but you cannot break your technique. So you take your solid technique education that you got as a beginner, and you apply it rigorously to the hardest training. If you claim to train hard, and you can go all the way to failure with great technique, I salute you. If you claim to train hard, but your technique breaks down towards the end of your sets, you could clean up your technique is what I'm trying to say. Because good technique is what allows us to target the musculature we want, and reduce injury risk. Sounds like a good deal.
As you train as an intermediate, bring your mind at peace, and start to notice which muscles are limiting factors on which exercises. And which exercises seem to give you the biggest stimuli proxies, like pump and soreness and tension in the muscle, and which ones give you the least of those proxies, and give you the most fatigue. And you're not just going to want to learn this about an exercise. You're going to want to learn it about rep ranges, too. So you could say something like this, just an example. Sets of 5 to 10 on leg press, really heavy, my knees feel weird. Sets of 20 to 30 on leg press, my lungs give out. I'm just breathing super heavy. I can't
Sets of 10 to 20 on leg press allow for continued progression even when cardio becomes limiting. Joints can feel great while bottoms of feet hurt and quads become unresponsive. The key insight is that while sets of 5 to 10 on leg press could become productive in the future, and sets of 20 to 30 reps might eventually be achievable with improved cardio, the best guess for constructing advanced routines points toward sets of 10 to 20 in the leg press based on the data collected.
The beginner stage involves learning how to walk properly and read the map at all. The intermediate stage is when the map really starts to fill itself out, allowing recognition of where peaks and valleys exist. The advanced stage focuses on traversing the peaks and valleys in the most effective way possible.
If not getting super sore or super pumped while healing super fast, add a working set to that muscle next week for that exercise and repeat the process. For example, if cable curls on Monday and barbell curls on Wednesday result in no noticeable training effect by Wednesday, add a set of cable curls the following week. Continue this formula of addition as long as not super sore, super tired, or not getting good pumps.
Advanced people are generally strong enough to have higher risks from high volume super heavy training, including both acute injury and chronic injury. Being big and strong relative to starting point makes injury risk a much more real factor in program design.
Advanced lifters often find that training all muscles to maximum recoverable volumes creates total fatigue exceeding systemic maximum recoverable volume. Like working five jobs when only two can be done well, the system becomes overwhelmed at 120 total sets per week or similar volumes.
Advanced folks in real world often have nagging injuries or history of acute injuries, creating off-limits exercises or rep range combinations. Heavy rack deadlifts may be over after herniated discs, ultra heavy jam presses may no longer work after tricep avulsion, and ultra heavy laterals may cause shoulder pain.
Advanced lifters make slow gains and do not make rapid gains in most cases. The irony is that making any gains at all requires ultra high efforts per set and ultra high volumes of sets, sometimes needed just to make any gains whatsoever.
Advanced folks have mastered technique. They have mastered training hard and estimating reps in reserve, with scientific literature showing advanced individuals hit their reps in reserve within about one rep of actual result. This makes RIR tracking accurate for advanced lifters, unlike beginners.
Advanced lifters know which exercise and rep range combinations have the highest stimulus to fatigue ratios for them. They know which splits, exercise and muscle group combinations and orders work best. They understand whether training triceps first then chest works better than the reverse for their specific physiology.
Advanced lifters have distinctly more developed and less developed muscle groups due to different genetics for muscle expression. Clear areas exist for asymmetric improvement to bring up weak points or exploit strong points.
Do not do other people's programs or splits. Modify from theirs or build your own from scratch. When training pro bodybuilders, the process is always interactive rather than prescriptive. Advanced folks know their body super well and should not lapse into doing website-printed workouts when not making gains on their own programming.
Choose exercises, rep ranges, and training splits that give the best guess at optimal stimulus-to-fatigue ratios. Keep an open mind but avoid doing too much that almost certainly won't work. Years of experience with exercises like underhand pull-ups that shred elbows and barely activate lats should inform choices toward parallel pull-ups instead.
Pay close attention to mind-muscle connection, defined as detection of tension and burn in the target muscle during hard sets. Maximize mind-muscle connection by using best technique with as little external loading as possible. For leg press, bringing feet closer together, lower down, pointing toes out, wearing weightlifting shoes, and sinking deeper might reduce weight from 700 pounds to 500 pounds for sets of 10 while maintaining equivalent quad activation through improved mind-muscle connection.
Maximize tension from given weight rather than trying to do as much weight as possible. Over weeks, increase weight, but when picking starting weights for mesocycles, use best technique to avoid excessive weights with bad technique.
Train four to six or more times per week, almost always including a rest day. The plus in six plus may include double days such as back in AM and shoulders and biceps in PM twice a week. Sessions take 1 to 2 hours each.
Take half or at least a third of muscle groups and put them in either maintenance volume or minimum effective volume, which is about a third of typical volume. If typically doing 24 sets for chest at end of mesocycle, non-prioritized chest might do at most about 8 sets. A third to half of body goes on back burner while half to two-thirds goes on front burner.
For prioritized muscles, train from minimum effective volume all the way up to maximum recoverable volume. Aim for true maximum recoverable volume at end of every muscle cycle in last week before deload. Design plans to start at 10 to 15 working sets per muscle per week and progress over four to six weeks to 25 to 35 or more working sets per muscle per week, especially for smaller, weaker muscle groups.
Volume progression from 10 to 15 sets up to 25 to 35 sets is individualized and auto-regulated. Individualized means knowing your body well enough to start with 5 sets for hamstrings and 30 sets for side delts as examples. Other people may choose very different starting numbers. Auto-regulated means adjusting volumes up or down week by week based on recovery, or using appropriate ratings in training apps.
Advanced lifters can accumulate unbelievable fatigue because they know how to push hard, train at volume, and are already beat up from previous training. Active rest phases should be incorporated one to two times a year as two-week periods of hardly training at all. These breaks every six to twelve months reset fatigue and provide months of amazing training afterward.
Aim to add 2.5 pounds to the bar per week or a rep every other week. Beginners can sometimes go up two reps and 10 pounds. Intermediates typically stick to about one rep per week increase or 5 pound increase. Advanced progression must account for slower adaptation, slower fatigue drop, and greater accumulation. Trying to progress by 10 pounds or 5 pounds and reps simultaneously leads to hitting failure way earlier than planned, requiring half deloads or recovery sessions.
Beginners train with whole body splits and basic movements in the five to 10 rep range a few times a week. Intermediates train whole body or basic splits like upper lower or push pull with all movements and rep ranges in three to six weekly sessions. Advanced lifters train with specialized programs designed to focus on specific muscle groups, using exercise and rep range combinations known to work best based on years of intermediate experience.
Volumes in specialized muscle groups need to reach 20, 25, 30, 35, or more work sets per muscle per week if recoverable. Training occurs four, five, six, or more times including two-a-day sessions lasting one to two hours each.
Being any given level is not a badge of honor. Advanced training is actually an inconvenience requiring crazy programs and deprioritization of other activities to achieve any growth. Maintain beginner results with beginner volumes rather than rushing into intermediate training. Milk as much as possible from each stage before advancing. Steve Hall discusses this beginner-intermediate-advanced dichotomy extensively on Instagram and YouTube.
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