How Many Sets YOU Should Do For MAXIMUM Muscle Growth (ft. Dr Mike Israetel) 

RU-vid is out of pocket for that

All involved are junk volume fans so it's no big deal. Just different flavors of the same bad advice.

V-shred is before every video now hahaha

Exactly

​@@keropnw3425tell us you're talking out of your ass without telling us.

Yep ! I’m 47 and my joints are super beat up from years of wrestling etc Whenever I push the volume too hard my recovery goes to hell

I feel if one has worked out enough in his life then he becomes better at less time at gym while being more accurate and productive. Also, the muscle growth would have already reached the peak and person wisely realises that there is much more to life and lets just focus on maintenance of the strength and muscle one has grown in his life, as not everybody wants or can become a body builder. Lift wisely. The comment perfectly puts up tha injury post 40 can set one back for months.

Yup, if I’m doing a 5x5 squat at 85% of my 1RM max for example then I can barely even sit on the toilet or tie my shoes I’m so sore. And at 45 it takes me a good 7 sets or so to work my way to 455 pounds because my body can’t take going from 225 to 450 like when I was 26 or so. Already pushing that volume limit by the time I hit my desired weight on a heavy day. I’ve found that doing one good set of 5 reps at a relatively high weight is good enough. Less soreness and always me to train legs more than once per week

I'll be 54 this year my body is tore up from the floor up

I’m 47 and I now do 20 reps of a weight that gives me a good burn or pump with 30-45 rest in between sets.

Big dick energy

Science & bro jokes, all a gym rat needs

Ye there’s no way ur doing 52 sets a week just for quads especially with extra stuff. Defo not with just squats. I like to personally shift between high volume and high intensity. It’s like a breath of fresh air. After a good high volume phase for only a few muscles. I just take that movement. Chop all that volume and just go to failure.

How does anyone know if these studies are true? It comes down to trusting people you don’t know, remember the easy thing for someone to do is lie. So I feel everyone should just experiment with their own training and see what works for them because everyone is different.

​@@steelphantom9105 there is no reason not to trust the literature - especially if you are dealing with meta-analyses. Especially in this case there is no benefit in falsifying any data. As a researcher your goal is to publish stuff. Whether your data supports or contradicts a certain hypothesis does not matter - in both cases you can put the results into a paper and/or your PhD-Thesis. When looking at drugs and supplements - things look different. There you really have to dig into the studies to see whether the data quality is sufficient to support the claims and who's paying for the research (often the company producing that stuff).

@@steelphantom9105 that’s a very silly argument and makes zero sense in every way. Shows a non existent understanding of the scientific process and a nihilism that doesn’t know how integrity is achieved. U can tell easily whether studies are true based on the scientist, the journal, the actual results, how it’s compared to other results, has it been peer reviewed, can it be repeated. Is there a reason for lies? Is there any conflicting interest and biases. These are all asked and measured by the scientific community. U seem to think people (at least those of the scientific mind) read it and accept it as gospel. So no, that is a very poor argument. If ur supposition is anything and everything can be a lie. While it doesn’t mean ur wrong, it does mean ur devoid of reasonable logic and problem solving. The second half of ur point I agree with

​@@steelphantom9105the studies are true. Most are just too fragile and don't have enough resilience and discipline.

how many sets per muscle you do now ? and are you seeing results ?

@@peanuts9228 my issue is taking a nearly 20 year “break” from 6 days a week to 0 days a week. Back to 6 days a week. Divorce is a hell of a motivator. 😂

​@rick9705 I'm 35 just went through a break up and haven't lifted a weight since the Army in 2012. Time to turn into a monster again. Just hope my heart holds out.

@@bigworm6614bro you’re 35. Unless you’re an overweight fast food addicted smoker your heart should be fine.

Same I can definitely tell I need an extra rest day and a deload. Dr Mike out here saving lives

Yes, but also improving your technique has also big influance. I started my chest focus meso with 7 sets (goal after two weeks of traning it usually go 4, 5 , 6 then 7) chest twice, a week. And my dips technique after two mesocycles got so much better, that i wans’t able to recover to the next workout. I had to cut volume to 5 sets. And that gave me really great gains.

I would say it's the least amount you need to continually progress. There is no need to push yourself to the absolute limit.

​@adammiller9179 This is the complete opposite of optimizing your ability to progress.

exactly right... my volume requirements are much higher than most people, but it also produces outsized gains for me compared to most people... we all have genetically different work capacity and what benefits us

True, but absolute optimization honestly not the most important thing for most people and it shouldn't be.

What is your routine?

It’s easy wtf you mean

Not necessarily, if you train a muscle group twice, and you factor in warm-up sets. Definitely not something to jump into, but if you've been training for years and work your way up, it's actually not that bad.

Drop sets, reverse pyramids I can pump out 6 sets in a few minutes no rest slow strict form.

Maybe 1 set 1 rep.so 52 sets can easily achieved lol

I have trained with a lot of national and pro competitors, I have never known anyone to do this.

I'm glad you've warned me 😂😂😂

"High volume", says 20-25 sets lol

but the thing is, that's not even high volume... i think i've done 30 to 40 sets a day, 6 days a week for 3 to 5 months before i noticed a systemic fatigue (which is a massive mistake by the way, you're never supposed to reach that point, always stop before that, and it's WAAAAAAAAAAAY better to stop too early and miss on some benefit, than reach that zone and start to rebuild, that takes forever and takes you BACKWARD first, colossal waste) so...p lease don't push through that... realize that your program DOESN'T MEAN SHIT>.. you're supposed to listen to your body over some program which is the same for everyone in the world... it's just numbers on paper, it doesn't know YOU... the moment you felt that, instantly, take a whole week off, and then continue like nothing happened...

@@notimportant3686you weren’t doing 30 to 40 sets to failure brother. Hate to break it to you.

@@J20-p5d sure i was... i don't know what failure means to you but to me that's starting a rep i'm unable to complete

@@J20-p5dagreed!

Great for skinny noodles

What you just desrcibed is for beginners who have never really actually trained. Anyone whos even an intermediate lifter shouldnt follow what youve just said and heres why. Resting 3-4 minutes for upper body so let's say you do just 5 exercises for Chest in a workout (Incline Press, Flat Press, Cable Flys, Dips and Pull Overs) for example that means you've spent 45 minutes in the gym just resting and that's if your only doing 3 sets for each exercise. 3(mins) x 3(sets) = 9 x 5(exercises) = 45 mins rest (Not needed imo) Your doing 4 sets and taking 3-4 minutes rest so your resting anywhere between 48 minutes (if you only do 4 exercises each with 4 sets each with 3 minute rests inbetween) to 1 hour just resting. I would say shorten your rest periods! and I'd also consider 8 reps to be OK for muscle Hypertrophy as apposed to 10-12 which is still OK but with 8-12 reps you have 4 reps in which you could lift slightly more and reach True failure rather than just lifting untill you reach 10 to 12 reps Also pyramiding only up?? Why as the workout goes on the body gets more fatigued in many cases it actually makes scientific sense to pyramid down starting heavy and ending lighter in weights. What I would recommend based on personal expirance from training for 19 years with trial and error and also PT qualifications is training 4-5 days a week and scrapping the BRO split where we train Chest on Mondays etc, to training every muscle group x2 per week (atleast upperbody) for example such as a push pull legs split this atleast in my expirance has made the biggest changes for me.

@@phoenix_club_gaming9428But then he can’t camp out on all of the equipment and let everybody know he’s in the gym.

@@phoenix_club_gaming9428this is what my PT is getting me to do, still such a slow slog to get the definition and gains.

no age/diseases listed, no care

You’re not supposed to do high volume training anyway lol. It’s an inferior way of training. 2-3 days a week and 20-30 minutes in the gym is all you need, bud.

@@Anti_Brainrot3 depends on your goals, but that sounds too low imo

@@djomla9999depends on intensity.

@@Anti_Brainrot3for maintenance that would be barely enough, but if you really want to gain muscle that would be way to low volume!

​@@starwars007oeleWould be possible to make quite good gains but most people can't handle HIT. Much easier to make dozens of sets with half the intensity and similar or better gains but much more time wasted, too.

❤..... I thought the same thing.

train 3x a week, train hard, take 2 + rest between sets, do not train for more than 1h and 30min and enjoy the gains

​​@@m4andi0cadiet is also very important. Get enough protein or you'll not get the gains. Plus rest and sleep well.

What's rir

@@stevethea5250reps in reserve

@@stevethea5250 rep in reserve

@@stevethea5250reps in reserve

Reps in reserve. Doing a set when you know you will get 3 or 2 reps more and after that faliure. But it's very complicated​@@stevethea5250

How do you know 15 sets per muscle group a week works best for you? Also what are your goals? Someone looking to maximize the amount of muscle they can put on should do more than 15 sets. If you're always recovering very quickly then you're definitley not maximizing your results, and thats what this video is about.

And not making pedofile jokes

Rather restrained so as not to be funny.))

This is a hilarious comment 😂

Its especially nice not to hear him making sex offender jokes

I like it when he trys to be funny. He's hilarious 😂!

Everyone has different recoverability. This is about starting at a low volume for a couple muscle groups and ramping up over time until you cant recover anymore, then deloading, cutting back the volume to desensitize those muscles while you pick a different group of muscles to prioritize. The more volume that you can do and recover will yeild better results. So until you actually push until its too much to recover from then you were leaving gains on the table. Sure some people can make gains doing 6-8 sets a week, but thats far from optimal.

@@andrewmorissette229 you're right, everyone did have different recovery ability. Try this one on. I worked in a physically demanding job for 9-10 hours a day, go home and rest then lift for an hour. And I could recover from that.... In my 40's. My recovery ability is pretty damn high. Although, I think you're missing the point. Bodybuilding is a marathon not a sprint. Everybody wants to be big and strong and they wanted it yesterday. So yeah, bro splits worked for about a year. But after that year, I got considerably bigger and stronger. When you physically have more tissue, you simply need more time to recover. I'm not overly concerned with "leaving gains in the table" since there is no deadline to my lifting I just want to be able to keep lifting for years to come. I'm not a competitive bodybuilder, like probably 99% of the people that watch this channel. So a lot of this advice is simply not geared towards me or you. Especially since I'm not enhanced.

@@PeteKona when i had a trainer instead of doing bemch press he would have me do long pauses on bench press, inclines, narrow grip and so on to lower the intensity of the sets. Someone with a 900lb deadlift might take 14 days to recover affer a max effort, but that same person could do deficit deadlifts with a pause in the middle with way less weight to lower recovery time.

Advanced lifters do this mistake too. In fact beginners can get away with doing more mistakes because they will make noob gains anyway. The more advanced you are the less margin of error you have.This is why most people after they finish they noob gains they stay intermediates for life or some get to advanced level but then make no gains and think they reached their "natural" limit. Advanced lifters often cant even handle as much volume because it becomes harder to recover.

I agree. If someone's doing 40-50 sets per week there would tend to be a good amount of junk volume if you're doing adaptive training with reps or weight. You can get close in 7 day week if you train the muscle mon-thur-sun.

1) There's a decent amount of research around 40-50 sets with better results. 2) It's logical that as an adaptive process, you improve not only in weight, but reps, sets, etc. 3) Tons of guys, eg, Arnold, Sheiko, do more than 50 sets and are among the GOATs.

@@littlethuggie 1) not if those are legit sets to or near failure. A natural bodybuilder would not be able to recover from 40 legitimate sets 2) not really logical because where would the limit be? If you lift weights all your life you would eventually be doing 200 sets a week per body part after a while. There is such a thing as maximum recoverable volume 3) they were genetic freaks on steroids

Hit that elliptical for 10 to 15 minutes before you start anything too.

Best warm up for older guys: Indian clubs..really feel any problem areas and really mobilized the shoulders.

Etathamlakis

×=÷€$&@&!€× ? Who should unterstand this?

Most people watching these videos arent that in tune with their body. I would recommend trying different rep ranges for 2-3 months at a time for different exerxises, slowly ramp up sets for a couple muscle groups at a time until you are doing more than you can recover from. Then drop the sets for those muscle groups and pick a couple other muscle groups to slowly increase sets over time until you cant recover.

When I last trained with a partner, we noticed my strength was higher on working sets when I did more high-rep warm-up sets, and I generally was stronger on 2nd or 3rd peak working set than my first one. When I would just do a couple low rep warmup sets, or even 10 reps, I wasn't as strong for the working sets. For reference, I've been training consistently for 25+ years now. I'm generally at my best doing each upper muscle group 2x/week, legs once, and in total (warmup+working sets) around 20-25 per group/per workout. But whenever Ive been forced out of gym (health issues or whatnot), I take a good 3-4 weeks easing back into my prior volume.

@@TKFOH I fall into a similar category as you. I’m an aging former college athlete, been lifting for 20+ years. I’m reaching the age where I’m seeing my recovery time slow down and my endurance slip a bit. I’ve always benefitted from hitting all body parts twice a week to week and a half. When I get more than 4 rest days, the workouts are usually shit. In light of Father Time, I have been extending some of my rest periods to the 3 day mark on a more regular basis. (I used to average 2 days of recovery between hitting the same muscle group) That being said, I’ve always felt better and had better workouts varying from 3-5 sets in the 8-15 rep range with added accessories for each muscle group. (Usually 9-15 sets per session, two sessions a week, depending on where I am in my intensity) However, I see a lot a people talking about junk volume and over training, which, since I’m beginning to feel my age, I’m trying to be cognizant of.

​@@TKFOHso is that 20-25 sets on say shoulders, 2x/week?

@@MrElectroDan Yes. Example, 5-7 sets dbell shoulder press, 3-4 sets lateral raise, 3-4 sets front raise, 3-5 sets shrugs, 3-4, sets rear delts, for 17-24 total. That includes warmup sets, and 2-3 "top"/"working" sets each exercise. Tuesday, and again on Friday. I also do back same day, around same number of sets, and walk 20-30 mins on Incline after. It's generally around 90 mins in gym total In 25+ years consistently in the gym, I've always got best results from increased volume.

Junk volume is simply any additional volume where recovery becomes your limiting factor for continued growth. Watch some of RP's videos on recovery. Find the volume limits for yourself based on recovery ability amd progression.

Me! I have 3 workouts per week, full,upper,lower. After my full day i can take 2-3 days off. If i only take 1 day off, i feel so exhausted.

1-2 sets per week? My guy that's not a workout, that's a warmup 🤦

@@FirstnameLastname-yc2mt that's why you're small

@@jylongbun8790 lol. K

Reps ranges vary depending on what you're trying to achieve. Lower reps for body building and higher reps for power lifting. In general though Mikes always refers to anywhere between 6 - 30reps/or failure.

@@carloscastano3666 🤣

You have that backwards

Sets to failure or 1 rir

Every set in every single study was 10 rir at least lmao

Aka """hard sets""""

JP is an animal in the best of ways, but I don't think his approach qualifies as a philosophy. He has said on his own social media that he trains as he does just because he likes it, not because it's the best for anyone else. - Dr. Mike

I think we need to see JP on gear and filling out... Would he still be too Canadian for his own good or would be be bow hunting his own food?

3:50 That is an INSANE amount of volume for a muscle and not recoverable at all. Dr Mike is confusing muscle fatigue adaptation and hypertrophy. Yes when your muscles build fatigue resistance from such retarded amounts of volume you will see hypertrophy. But The muscle fatigue can be skipped entirely and pure gains can be made. When you train with such high amounts of volume you cannot recover in terms of motor unit recruitment and you will not progress as fast as is possible. 5:44 your strength won’t plateau if you manage fatigue appropriately. Reduce your amount of sets, train to 1/2 RIR in a 5-10 rep range, ideally 1 RIR at 5/6 reps. And you will see exponentially more growth, redcuded soreness and increased strength consistently. If you “plateau” it means somewhere you’re accumulating too much fatigue and you cannot recruit enough motor units to lift the weight. Stop trying to medicate the illness when you can prevent the infection in the first place AKA stop trying to recover quicker or “better” when you can just not get hurt in the first place. 7:37 not necessarily exactly related but it made me think of the fact that it takes an extra 5 sets to get the same amount of hypertrophy from the first set alone but all the fatigue and muscle damage you will accumulate from those following sets if you go all the way up to 6 sets can be unrecoverable in terms of maximal motor unit recruitment and like Dr Mike said muscle damage. 8:00 if you’re in the gym for more than an hour the chance you’re doing too much volume is really high. Revise your training. 9:20 in regards to injury. You simply won’t get injured if you a) don’t do copious amounts of volume and really high reps. And b) control the weight, range of motion and warm up appropriately. 10:00 “cumulative fatigue” at the “systemic level”. What system? When you do 20 sets per muscle per week you accumulate a shite load of supra-spinal cns fatigue. Your motor cortex refuses to recruit more motorunits because the amount of fatigue mechanisms that are present from that amount of volume start to become too difficult to clear away. The reason it takes a couple weeks is because your body will first develop adaptions to reduce your susceptibility to said fatigue but this has a limit. You cannot indefinitely develop a reduction in this susceptibility or else I could train you to a point when if I kept feeding you and giving you water and oxygen you could do an indefinite amount of reps on an exercise. Simply DONT do as many sets per week, manage your fatigue by not accumulating fatiguing mechanisms in the first place and then you can continue to train without needing “deload weeks” and the chance that you will plateau will shrink to almost nothing. 10:25 why not just not do that amount of volume ever at all? It’s really interesting listening to people who think this kind of training is the way to train because you start your first weeks of a mesocycle with lower sets… you don’t fatigue as much… and you see progress… hmmmm. Then you up the sets, feel more fatigued, see what you think is progress but is just inflammation and edema build up all the way up until week 6-8 where you’re doing an insane amount of volume like 20 sets per muscle per week and you’re confused as to why you’re plateauing and always in pain. All you’re doing is damaging the muscle and reducing motor unit recruitment which reduces hypertrophy. 10:35 again, trying to treat the symptoms when you can just not catch the cold is wild. Don’t train so hard that you accumulate all this fatigue and reduce hypertrophy in the first place instead of wasting a week recovering from all the accumulated fatigue when you could’ve been training an appropriate amount close to failure and been making consistent gains. 10:45 “start this big fatigue wave” yeah because that amount of volume causes insane amounts of fatigue. So don’t train with that amount of volume because all fatigue does is reduce hypertrophy 11:50 “slowly built up your work capacity” is just developing adaptions to aid in reducing fatigue. Again, this is not infinite. It will cap out and you will develop too much fatigue to recover from and will lose out on hypertrophy with too much volume 12:30 “easily recovering”, if recovering means you feel okay and you’re not sore that doesn’t mean necessarily you’re back to maximum motor unit recruitment. You’ve developed enough (for lack of a better word) “anti-fatigue”adaptions then yes you will “feel” recovered but your motor cortex will still be inhibited by fatiguing “left overs” so to speak from too much volume. 12:40 “why not add a few sets”, because it’s not recoverable. Point blank. 16:00 in regards to the study Mike wants to see. The group that does 3 sets 3 times a week will see the most hypertrophy. The group increasing volume over the weeks will eventually when reaching enough volume have reduced hypertrophy due to an increase in fatigue whereas the first group will just continue to train while progressively overloading with weight and or reps on their exercises. If you read everything I wrote you’re a g, I advise you to look up and study the physiology of the human body if you don’t believe me and everything I’ve said. Forgive me if you read it all and are more informed on what I’ve said and can see where I may or may not have made a mistake or two I did the best off the top of my head 😭.

@@7Sabbath7your comment is so well put together it should not be under a lone one but in the main section so more people could see, agree or debate over it. Thumbs up

No one is reading all that shit, Karen

​@@7Sabbath7 what you recomend ?

You just had to be that ONE guy

@@The_Patbeyalways right ? 🤡

good one lol

0:53 me too me too. Oh wait, wrong timestamp.

@@user-ii7xc1ry3x 😏😏