How many weekly setsa muscle actually needs.
Count a muscle group's sets across one week and see where they land on the dose-response curve. The answer isn't a number: it's a slope that keeps rising but flattens, and it changes depending on whether you're after strength or size.
Sets that target the muscle: a curl for the biceps, a leg extension for the quads.
Sets where it assists: a row for the biceps, a squat for the hamstrings. These count half.
12fractional sets per week
Intermediate efficiency
The curve keeps rising, more slowly: around 8 or 9 extra sets buy the next measurable increment. This is where most experienced lifters train.
- More than enough for strength: that curve flattens near 5 weekly sets and you're past it.
- 7 more sets move you into the next band: roughly 1,5 percentage points of extra growth.
How sets are counted
A direct set trains the muscle as its target. An indirect one involves it as an assistant, and counts half.
That 0.5 isn't an inherited convention. Pelland and colleagues empirically compared all three counting methods —indirect as 1, as 0.5, as 0— and every Bayes factor favoured 0.5, with strong or very strong support.
The authors are explicit about it: it's a heuristic, not a standard. The right weight probably depends on the exercise, the rep range and your training status. It's for ordering decisions, not for exact bookkeeping.
Strength and size don't ask for the same thing
This is the distinction almost no calculator makes, and it changes the whole answer.
- Strength: the curve flattens fast. Past roughly 5 weekly sets per muscle, extra sets don't produce strength gains that separate from measurement error. What matters above that point is intensity and frequency.
- Hypertrophy: no plateau appears until at least 30 or 42 weekly sets. Diminishing returns yes, a ceiling no — at least within what the evidence can measure.
Which is why the same volume can be plenty for one goal and short for the other.
Why you won't see MEV, MAV or MRV here
It's the framework nearly everyone uses: minimum effective volume, maximum adaptive volume, maximum recoverable volume. It sounds precise and it's easy to remember.
The problem is that in eleven years not a single peer-reviewed study has measured those quantities in a person. It's not that the evidence is weak: there isn't any.
And there's experimental evidence against MRV as a ceiling. Enes and colleagues took 31 trained people up to around 52 weekly quad sets for 12 weeks, and the collapse the framework predicts didn't happen.
What does exist is a measured curve. That's what this tool draws, with its limits marked: where the evidence runs out, the chart says so instead of continuing the line.
Where these numbers come from
Pelland JC, Remmert JF, Robinson ZP, Hinson SR, Zourdos MC. “The Resistance Training Dose Response: Meta-Regressions Exploring the Effects of Weekly Volume and Frequency on Muscle Hypertrophy and Strength Gains.” Sports Medicine, 2026.
67 studies, 2,058 participants, direct site-specific measures only. Open data and code.
The authors disclose that they work as coaches and writers in the fitness industry. They published their full data and code, which is more transparency than any commercial source in this field offers — but it's worth knowing.
Myosin works this out on its own
Here you have to count the sets by hand. In the app, volume per muscle group comes from the workouts you already logged, week by week, with nothing extra to fill in.
