Not Growing? You Aren’t Training Enough
In a Nutshell
The core message is that most people aren't training enough volume to maximize muscle growth, and the "Club of Sevens" (5-10 sets of 5-10 reps, twice weekly per muscle) is too low for stubborn muscle groups. Research shows 30-50 sets per muscle per week often produces better hypertrophy than 5-20 sets, provided you stay under your maximum recoverable volume where strength still increases session-to-session. When low volume isn't working, increase frequency, use myo-reps, or add supersets rather than just adding more traditional sets.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
There is a global conspiracy amongst us. The best training to gain muscle is 5 to 10 sets of 5 to 10 reps done twice a week per muscle. Most people thrive on higher volumes than they think, but not everybody. The hypothesis is that you are either doing too much volume or not enough volume. Not enough is almost always the case. You might need to do some higher volumes especially to bring up lagging muscle groups because that's the answer for growth more times than it's not.
Are you training enough to make your best gains? If told that training only a little bit every week could give the best results, would you do it unquestioningly or be skeptical? The big glaring reason that you're not making your best gains, especially in muscle groups with which you are struggling the most, is because you're just not doing enough training. Too few sets per week is your problem.
Minimum effective volume is the smallest amount of work you can do, the smallest number of usually sets per week working sets of your exercises for any given muscle. The smallest number of sets per week that you can do and see the least detectable gains. It's the minimum amount of volume that gives you any kind of progress. Anything more than that is going to cause you dependable growth. That growth continues generally seemingly to increase until you hit a very high point of number of weekly sets. That high point is called your MRV, your maximum recoverable volume.
Maximum recoverable volume means you are beating your body up so much that it cannot recover any volume beyond that. So, 30 sets a week for biceps is your maximum recoverable volume, 32 sets per week is a fast ticket to overreaching and eventually overtraining and is not going to dependably and reliably produce growth for you.
The big insight is between these two values. So long as you can still recover, which means your strength goes up a little bit from session to session to session. That's how we define recovery, a return to past performance. If you're at least as strong as you were and ideally just a little bit stronger, then the more volume you do and still preserve that relationship of getting a little bit stronger every time, usually the more muscle growth gains you will experience.
If you're doing 10 sets per week for your quads and you're still increasing strength a little bit each session, probably 12 sets per week of quads will grow you more muscle. If you're starting to do 12 sets per week instead of 10 and you're still making little bitty gains, probably 14 sets per week will grow you more muscle.
It is not the fastest way to make you stronger because the fatigue comes up and it interferes with the expression of strength. So, in the short term before you take a deload, it won't help your strength do more volume past much lower point. But for muscle growth, as long as you're demonstrating that you're under your MRV and demonstrating this by making a being able to gain a little bit of strength between sessions, even just 2 and 1/2 lb on the bar or one extra rep, that means your volume you're doing is absolutely causing you growth, and probably you could have more growth if you did a little bit of volume and were still able to perform.
Back about 10 or 15 years ago, when most of us didn't know each other yet, the view was that at some high number of sets per week, recovery constraints were going to make gains north of those volumes plateau and then regress. The term maximum recoverable volume was named because it was thought that past a certain point, we were going to see degradation of hypertrophy stimulus with just too much volume.
The speculation was that the number of sets per week that was too much for most people was really in the conversation for much over 20 sets per week per muscle. If you're training your biceps with six sets three times per week, that's 18 sets total, back in the day, you were considered a high volume person.
Between then and now, there has been a decade of university studies exactly on real human trainees to ask the question of how much muscle growth do you get from higher volumes and how much volume is the point of negative returns or at the very least zero returns.
Multiple studies since then, dozens of studies since then, have shown that compared with doing 5, 10, or even 20 sets per muscle per week in the research environment, 30, 40, and in one landmark study at its peak even 52 sets of working sets per muscle per week caused better gains than 5, 10 and even 20 sets.
Basically if we split it up like this, we have 5, 10, and 20 sets on one side and we have 30, 40, and 50 sets on another and you have to be like, okay, we just give these programs to random people, who's going to grow more muscle? The high-volume group, 30, 40, 50 sets, or the low-volume group, 5, 10, 20 sets? Most of the time, almost all of the time, it's going to be the higher-volume group of 30, 40, or 50 sets.
There are realistic constraints on this. This absolutely does not mean that everyone needs to be doing 52 sets for all their muscles per week.
Individual Differences
Reason number one is that individual differences exist. Some people thrive on higher volumes. Some people thrive on lower volumes. Most people thrive on higher volumes than they think, but not everybody. It goes muscle group by muscle group. You may have a muscle group that loves higher volume and grows way better at higher volumes. You may also have a muscle group on the same body or multiple that really do better with lower volume. People have different MRVs and MEVs, and you might be a low volume ideal responder.
Systemic Fatigue
The next big constraint is that systemic fatigue is real. If you just train your quads and only your quads, the amount of total systemic fatigue from training only your quads in a whole week in a whole 12 weeks of training isn't that high because you're not training the rest of your body. In the real world, most of us train most of our bodies, if not all of our bodies. Your total systemic fatigue is really high, and you're adding up the fatigue of all these sets of all of these exercises done to crazy high volumes for all of your muscle groups, and all of a sudden it goes way past your systemic maximum recoverable volume.
In the real world, people's systemic maximum recoverable volumes, if we adjust it to per muscle group means per muscle group much more than 20 or 30 working sets sustained for weeks is about as much as most people can push.
Time Constraints
Another constraint is time. If you really want to put in as much volume as it required to max out your growth for all muscles, you're going to need like 12 hours a week. Most people don't have 12 hours a week. What you end up doing is fitting as much volume as you can into like three to six hours a week that you're able to train.
There is a global conspiracy amongst us. It is called the club of sevens. That's how they call themselves. It's a global low volume cabal. The same people behind closed doors that are and interact with the Illuminati, the lizard people, and of course the hardcore just lift, bro, don't overcomplicate it crowd. The gym bros, they have come up with a training method and they think it's the truth and they will yell at you online about it.
It is a group of people that will tell you the best training to gain muscle is five to 10 sets of five to 10 reps done twice a week per muscle. They'll tell you that with their dying breaths. Now, they don't even say per week, they say per seven days. Seven is almost the middle number between five and 10. These folks are spreading on the internet like wildfire. Five to 10 reps per set, five to 10 sets per session, two sessions per week, they say is the optimal for muscle growth, and any more is a stupid idea.
This style of training, five to 10 reps per set, five to 10 sets per session, two sessions a week, is amazing for beginners because it's not so heavy that their technique is going to go to, it's not so high rep that their technique is going to go to, and it's not so much volume because they don't need that much volume because they respond really well.
Intermediates sometimes would just reduce their effort and do mail-in sets, very, very high reps in reserve, if they do too much volume. Or their technique starts to suck. So, for intermediates that don't have a ton of bandwidth for training, this is an amazing way to train.
For folks looking for a great combination of strength and size, sets of five to 10 with such low volumes allows you to train heavier and keep a lower overall systemic fatigue profile for the entire training block, which means you can add more weight between sessions and thus your strength expression is higher.
Some people have muscle groups that are more fast-twitch dominant that take a long time to heal from high volumes and a shorter time to heal from lower volumes. For those muscle groups, this is great. Muscle groups like chest, muscle groups like hamstrings, and many people are really going to respond super well to five to 10 reps, five to 10 sets, two times a week.
This approach is incomplete. It doesn't work well, nearly as well as higher volumes do, for the following cases:
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Stubborn muscles that won't grow much. This has been tested directly. When people have trouble growing, they assign them to either a low volume group or a high volume group. The high volume group almost always produces better results than low volume. The hypothesis there is that you're either doing too much volume or not enough volume. Not enough is almost always the case.
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Muscles that fail to get very pumped and very sore. They're just not getting disrupted. For any given amount of volume, they almost always grow better if you give them more volume so they can become more pumped and more sore. Some of your muscles get pumped and sore from two sets, some from eight sets. The ones that need eight sets, they really need the eight sets to give you your best growth.
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Muscles that continue to perform at high level set after set after set probably respond better to higher volumes. You want to get them to a place where they finally start to fatigue. That's where the growth comes from.
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Muscles that seem to be 100% recovered the day after training. These muscle groups that heal really rapidly, that don't seem to get disrupted and typically probably because they're slower twitch muscle fiber composition aren't your strongest muscle groups typically respond to higher volumes better.
Why is doing 30 sets a week for biceps such unpopular advice and why is minimalism do a little bit less than you'll have better results? Why is that so much more popular?
If you do sets of five to 10 reps, you do five to 10 sets of those and you do it twice a week, it's not a lot of training compared to the alternative. You get to go heavier. That means it's more fun. Heavier training is more fun for most people. You do fewer reps which means less pain. What hurts more? A set of 20 or a set of five? It's not even close. A set of 20 for sure.
The burn is psychological. You're doing low volume which means less work which means you're not bothered to do as much work because work is hard. In addition to that because of these lower volumes you accumulate less fatigue week to week which means you can jump up by five and 10 pounds on the bar instead of two and a half to five pounds. You can add two reps every time you come in instead of one. That is amazingly ego boosting.
Lower volume training is more fun, less painful, less work, and gives you bigger short-term ego boosts by strength gains. But the reality is that all is well until your muscles don't follow the minimalist rules. When your biceps or your triceps or your calves or your hamstrings or your quads or your back or whatever it is just are not progressing and growing very much from very low volumes. And then when you do higher volumes, they progress. In those cases, this just thankless labor is just more work that causes more gains.
You might need to do some higher volumes, especially to bring up lagging muscle groups because that's the answer for growth more times than it's not. Here are three awesome recommendations that aren't just like just do more sets:
Increased Frequency
Like you do five sets of curls. You don't want to do eight sets of curls. It just feels like junk volume. Don't. But instead of doing curls twice a week, do curls three times a week. Now you've gone from doing 10 sets of curls total per week to 15 sets of curls total per week by just adding a session for biceps. Big deal. Doesn't seem as hard. You're recovering just fine. You can still go hard and heavy, but you're literally multiplied the volume by an additional third. That's huge. That is going to cause notable gains if you're not already gaining well with low volumes.
Myo-Rep Sets
Do a set of 15 to 20 reps. Very close to failure. In a muscle that you need to bring up. And then add a few sets after that. But make them myo-rep sets. Where you stop the total work that you're doing when you hit that top end number from your first set. Let's say you got 18 reps on hamstring curls in the first set. In the second set you rested a normal amount of time, but you got tired. You were only able to do 14 reps. Wait for 5 or 10 seconds. Don't even go anywhere. Stay in that leg curl. And then hit up another set of four to get to 18 total. On your next set, you make it to 12 and then four and then two. And your next set after that 10 and then whatever and then whatever. So that each time you're getting 18 18 18 18. But you are getting close to failure numerous times and the volume is nuts. Even though it's not a ton of sets because you're having so many approaches to failure within a single set, you don't have to do eight sets. Four sets might be the equivalent volume of like seven or eight sets. It sucks, but you don't waste a lot of time doing it. One of the worst things about high volume training is the time that it takes in the gym. But if you do myo-reps and you condense your rest intervals to 5 to 10 seconds in some occasions, you're going to have an awesome time.
Traditional Supersets
Agonist supersets. You try tricep pushdowns. How many sets of tricep pushdowns with a cable are you really interested in doing? I'm not interested in doing that many. What you can do is a set of triceps push downs. Walk right over to either a deficit push-up situation, or if you're real pimp and really strong, a dip situation. And with 5 to 10 seconds rest, ideally little, you go right from cable push downs to either push-ups or dips. And you do another set of 5 to 10 real close to failure. That's a superset. The amount of volume and stimulus that's pouring into your triceps is massive. And because you don't rest long, it doesn't take a ton of time. You rest about a minute or two, come back to the push down situation, hit it again. So every single set is really two sets. One is isolation, the other is more compound, where that limiting factor is still your triceps. You can even do it with dumbbell press. Push downs, lay down on a bench, flat or incline dumbbell press, your triceps is limiting factor, it will cook that ass.
Try these three techniques. Try them only on a few of the muscles that to you seem like they recover real god damn fast, but just don't seem to be growing as well. And I almost guarantee you're going to see better results than if you did lower volumes. For the rest of you, your body keep the lower volumes no problem, because that's systemic fatigue, you don't want getting too high. So yes, it is true that sometimes simple minimalism works really well. But when it doesn't work well, don't be afraid to roll up your sleeves a little bit and pound it in with just more sets. It's not as fun all the time, but have you considered how fun your life would be if you had giant forearms, biceps, triceps, and delts, you could just be and you could be whatever.
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