How many sets per muscle per week? A table by training days

Four sources matter here, and they agree on the direction.

Pelland and colleagues (2025, published in Sports Medicine in 2026) is the newest. It pooled 67 studies and 2,058 people (79.1% male, average age about 25). Their models say that gains in muscle size and strength both rise as weekly volume rises, with diminishing returns. The diminishing returns are "considerably more pronounced" for strength. They also found that frequency has an effect on strength, but that its effect on muscle size is compatible with negligible.

Schoenfeld, Ogborn and Krieger (2017) pooled 15 studies, with 34 treatment groups. Each extra weekly set was linked to about 0.37% more muscle growth. Comparing the higher-volume group with the lower-volume group in each study, the difference was 3.9%. When they split volume into under 5, 5 to 9 and 10 or more sets per muscle, they found only a trend (P = 0.074), not a firm difference. They concluded that more volume gives more growth.

The 2026 American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) position stand (Currier and colleagues) reviewed 137 systematic reviews. It found that muscle growth was enhanced by higher volumes, at 10 or more sets a week. For strength it found that gains were enhanced by 2 to 3 sets, done at least twice a week. So the two goals want different volumes: strength gains flatten sooner than size gains.

Bickel and colleagues (2011) tested how little work keeps muscle. Young adults trained for 16 weeks, then cut their training to one third or one ninth of that dose for 32 weeks. In the young adults, both cut-down doses preserved the muscle they had built. The older adults (60 to 75) did not keep their muscle size.

What the research does not give you is a ceiling. The 10-set marker has support. The figure of 20 is a planning convention: where you stop depends on your recovery, your schedule and how well you can train when you are tired. If a lift has stopped moving, more volume is only one of the possible causes. Our guide to why a lift stalls lists the others.

Two cautions about all of this. In the largest of these studies, Pelland's, 79% of the people were men and the average age was about 25, so the results fit young men best. And "set" means different things in different studies, which is why the next section defines it.

In this guide, a hard set is a working set taken close to failure, within about 3 reps of it. That definition is a convention, not a finding: studies define their sets in different ways, and the best-known volume papers count sets as the study authors reported them. Warm-up sets do not count. In the Shojin app, a set counts toward your weekly total only if you completed it and it is not a warm-up. Drop sets count.

If you do not know how close to failure a set was, our guide to RPE and RIR shows how to rate it. A set that stopped 5 reps short of failure is a lighter set, and it should not count as a full one.

Pick one row for each muscle, not one row for your whole body. A lifter can push the back at 15 sets and keep the calves at 4. Start at the low end of your row for four to six weeks. Add a set or two to a muscle only when your lifts on it are moving up and you are recovering well.

Divide the weekly target by the number of days you train that muscle. The table gives the sets per muscle in one session.

Three things to know about this table.

The number of training days is not the number of times you train a muscle. Four days of upper/lower trains each muscle twice. Six days of push/pull/legs also trains each muscle twice. Look at the second column, not the first.

Two or three times a week is the safe default. In a 2016 meta-analysis of ten studies, Schoenfeld and colleagues found that training a muscle twice a week gave more growth than once a week when the total volume was equal. Whether three times beats twice was not settled. The newer Pelland analysis found that frequency's effect on muscle size was compatible with negligible once volume is counted. Taken together: if the total is right, the split matters less than the total. Choose the split that you can keep.

The sets in the table are for one muscle. A session trains several muscles at once. On a 3-day full-body plan with a target of 12 sets for each of six muscle groups, you would not do 24 sets of direct work on each day, because many of your sets count for more than one muscle. That is the next section.

A set of bench press trains the chest, and it also trains the triceps and the front of the shoulders. Counting only the main muscle undercounts the arms and shoulders of anyone who presses. Counting every muscle at full value overcounts them.

The Pelland meta-regression tested this directly. It counted the sets that trained a muscle indirectly as half a set (its "fractional" method), and that method had the strongest evidence of the ways they tried. So a bench press for the triceps is about half a triceps set.

Shojin's counting rule is a convention built on that idea. It is not a measurement, and other trackers use other rules. Each built-in exercise carries a credit for each muscle it works, in steps of 0.25 up to 1. A muscle group, such as arms or shoulders, takes the highest credit among its parts. A squat is one legs set, not one quads set plus one glutes set plus one hamstrings set. For a custom exercise with no credits, the main muscle counts as 1 and each secondary muscle as one half.

You can try your own week in the weekly sets calculator, which uses these credits.

Here is a 3-day full-body week of 39 sets, 13 in each session. It is a plain, sensible week, and many lifters would be happy with it. The totals show why you need to count.

Counted with the credits above, the week comes to:

Chest is the gap. It gets 6.75 sets, below the 10-set marker, even though the lifter presses on two of three days. Arms get 13, but only 4 of those are direct arm sets: the rest is credit from presses, rows and pulldowns. The count also shows how generous the half-credit is. If you think a pulldown does less for the biceps, your own arm total would be lower.

The fix is small. Add 4 sets of Incline Bench Press (Dumbbell) on day B. Chest goes to 10.75, shoulders to 12.25, arms to 15 and core to 7.5, and the week is 43 sets. One extra exercise brings the weakest muscle over 10 without a fourth training day.

Shojin counts your weekly sets for you. Its Home screen shows each muscle group's sets for the current Monday-to-Sunday week, and a body map shaded by how much work each muscle has had. It counts only completed sets that are not warm-ups, with the credit rule above. Coach uses the same rule: it checks each week of a program it writes against a weekly sets range for every muscle group, for too few sets and for too many.

The counts are a read-out, not a verdict. A muscle can sit at 8 sets for a week because you were away on a trip, and that is fine.

Shojin is one subscription with no cap on sets. Shojin Coach is part of it: it writes your program from your own lifts and adjusts it after every session you log.

New subscribers get one month free, then A$4.99 a month or A$34.99 a year, billed by the App Store in your local currency. The subscription renews until you cancel. Cancel any time in Settings. You subscribe in the iPhone app. If you stop, your history stays, and Coach stops adjusting your program.

Every number in this article traces to one of these. Where the evidence is contested or thin, the article says so rather than picking a side.