Finding the appropriate amount of weekly volume aligned with your goals always sparks debate.
One influencer advocates a single brutal set per muscle group performed to absolute failure. Another influencer recommends 30 sets for chest in a single workout. Both say science backs up their claims.
Are they both right? Are they both wrong? Is there an optimal spot on the Dose Response Curve for your training?
Clarity On Your Goal
One of the biggest mistakes people make is looking at the results and methods from another person and believing that application will work for them. The training methods for a body builder chasing hypertrophy are likely not a recommended path for a busy engineer who wants to get stronger and improve body composition.
While general fitness goals can follow a more generalized strength and conditioning approach, more specific goals will require a more specific training plan.
The general recommendations for hypertrophy (muscle size) and strength have some degree of overlap for the average person. Powerlifters are more concerned with absolute strength and body builders are focused more on hypertrophy and symmetry. Sprinters are more concerned with explosiveness and long distance runners are chasing endurance.
Don’t fall victim to Shiny Object Syndrome and keep switching programs. To quote strength coach Dan John, “the main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing”.
Is One Set Actually Enough?
Well…it does technically.
James Krieger’s meta-analysis pooled eight studies and found multiple sets produced about 40% more hypertrophy than a single set.
The effect size climbed as sets increased: 0.24 for one set, 0.34 for two to three, 0.44 for four to six.
Radaelli’s six-month trial on untrained men told the same story. Five sets built more arm size than three, and three beat one.
So one hard set works. It just doesn’t work as well as multiple sets.
Does Increasing The Dose Increase The Response?
Is there an upper limit of the dose response curve?
Schoenfeld’s dose-response review found that each additional weekly set kept adding a little more muscle, but the word “little” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Baz-Valle’s review compared 12 to 20 weekly sets against 20 plus, and found no real difference for quads or biceps. Triceps responded to the higher volume while the legs and biceps did not.
An Enes and colleagues trial tested the impact of volume on strength and muscle size. One group held steady at 22 weekly leg sets. Two other groups climbed to 42 and 52 sets over 12 weeks. While the quad size barely moved between groups, strength did not follow the same script. The guys doing 52 weekly sets got noticeably stronger than the guys steady at 22.
That’s not a fluke. Ralston and colleagues’ meta-analysis pooled nine studies and found the same graded relationship across a much bigger dataset: low weekly sets produced the smallest strength gains, and strength kept climbing as weekly sets increased from low to medium to high. With respect to strength, the research did not find a definitive plateau.
The Dose Response Curve shows a plateau for hypertrophy while strength continued to climb.
Hypertrophy and strength don’t follow the same curve. You can keep adding sets and keep getting stronger long after the muscle size has hit a plateau. The volume that maximizes one might be doing very little for the other.
The Dose Response Curve
A 2026 meta-regression by Pelland and colleagues found that hypertrophy rises with volume, but every additional set buys you a little less than the one before it. The dose response curve keeps bending flatter the further out you go.
In the “how many sets” discussion, one set works but it’s clearly not the ceiling. The bro-split guys weren’t wrong that more sets help, but more isn’t infinitely better.
The truth sits in the bend of the curve, and for most people that bend shows up somewhere in the 10 to 20 weekly sets range for a given muscle, which is exactly why we’ve written about rep ranges and weekly volume and the ACSM’s practical numbers here before.
None of this happens without recovery to back it up. Chase the top of that curve without the sleep, food, and rest days to support it, and you’ll find out fast what overtraining feels like.
How much work you can recover from matters more than how much work you can do.
