Why Volume Determines Growth

Philip Pape 0:00

If you are lifting weights but not seeing the muscle growth you expect, the problem might not be your effort. It could be your training volume. Too little volume and you're leaving gains on the table. Too much and you're just accumulating fatigue without the results. Today I'm breaking down the 12 rules of training volume that will help you find your sweet spot, especially if you're over 40 and want to build muscle efficiently without wasting time in the gym or risking burning out.

Fitness Lab App Offer

Philip Pape 0:28

Before we dive in, if you want personalized guidance on your training volume, recovery, and nutrition all in one place, check out my Fitness Lab app. It's like having a coach in your pocket who knows your schedule, your goals, your equipment, and your body. And right now, through January 2nd, you can get 20% off at witsandweights.com slash app. Now let's get into the 12 rules that will transform how you think about training volume. A replay from one of our most popular episodes this year. If you're hitting the gym consistently but still not seeing the muscle growth you want, you might be making one critical mistake with your training volume. Most lifters either do way too little to stimulate growth, or they pile on so much that they're just spinning their wheels and burning themselves out. Today we're gonna break down 12 evidence-based rules of training volume that separate the muscle builders from the muscle stragglers. You'll discover why your current approach to sets and reps might be holding you back in the one rule about proximity to failure that will transform every set from here on out. And today we're applying that systematic engineering thinking to one of the most misunderstood aspects of muscle building, and that is training volume. Volume, the V-word. You know, as engineers, as people who like to think through these things, we don't just throw more resources at a problem and hope that it works. We optimize, we find the minimum effective dose that produces the maximum results. And that is what we need to do with your training volume. Whether you're doing too little and wondering why you're not growing, or you're doing too much, wondering why you feel burned out, you're always tired, exhausted. Today's episode is gonna give you a framework to dial in your volume for your body, your goals, your lifestyle, and your training.

Launching Physique University

Philip Pape 2:35

Before we get into those 12 rules, I do want to share something pretty exciting that just happened recently. And that is that we just launched the new Wits and Weights Physique University. And I'm happy to say it's at a far more accessible price point at just $27 per month. It was 87, it's now 27. We do have an 87 option for more direct access to our not one but two coaches in there, myself included. And this $27 price point now still gives you access to the complete course library, our private community, our training templates, and really so much more in there, monthly QAs, live calls, but without the pressure of weekly check-ins or constant cadences that some of our members were saying was just a little too much. This is for those of you who are looking to get support and get an education to know what to do and how to do it, with some kick in the butt along the way, but without it feeling like it's taking over your life. Because I know we're busy. And here's the best thing for podcast listeners. If you join by the end of July using the special link in the show notes, it's the only link that'll get you this. You'll get a custom nutrition plan from me, absolutely free. I think I just butchered my words. That's a custom nutrition plan, which is normally a $47 add-on, but I'm going to throw it in for free and create that for you when you use the special podcast listener link in the show notes. And that's the same plan that I create for my private clients, now available to you in the program. And I'm giving it to you free as a podcast user for early access to the new WWPU launching in August. So you've got to take advantage of that by the end of July. Go use a link in the show notes, and we're gonna help you build that physique and create the healthy lifestyle

Inspiration And Evidence Base

Philip Pape 4:20

you want. So let's talk about training volume. But first, I want to give credit to where it is due because today's episode was inspired by an excellent and not surprisingly highly thorough, well-researched article called The New Approach to Training Volume by Greg Knuckles at Stronger by Science. Shout out to you, Greg. Greg is one of the smartest minds in the strength and conditioning world. And I'm gonna include a link to that article in the show notes because it's completely worth reading. And when I work with folks, when I work with clients, yes, I'm a nutrition coach, but training, strength training is a huge part of this. And I see the same patterns come up over and again. They come to me confused because they've tried this program, that program, high volume, low prog low uh low volume, maybe German volume training, I don't know. You know, the minimalist routines, everything. And nothing seems to be working for them or working consistently. And that's because I think there's some fundamental principles that govern how volume drives muscle growth. We talk about intensity a lot, about load, weight on the bar. There's definitely a almost dogmatic thinking around intensity versus volume in some circles. But I want to give volume the place that it deserves today. I want to treat volume like a training variable. That's all it is. It's a training variable. I don't want to treat it like that. It is that. And it produces a predictable output when you apply it correctly with the inputs, right? It's not a mysterious art form. Yes, there seems to be some level of art, let's say, when it comes to lifting, but it really can be broken down into some principles that you can test and experiment with to see what works.

Rule 1: Measure Hard Sets

Philip Pape 5:54

So let's start with it. Rule number one volume is best measured in hard sets per muscle group. So right off the bat, I probably surprised you because you think of volume as total sets, period. But I think the most important concept here is how we measure volume. Most people think of it in terms of tonnage, sets times reps times load, or just pure sets, right? But what really drives muscle growth, hypertrophy, is the number of hard sets performed per muscle group per week. And we know this, it's well established in the literature. We're not talking about training to failure, we're talking about training in some proximity to failure, regardless of whether you're doing five reps or 15 or 20 reps, whether you're using 135 pounds or 405 pounds. And this matters because tonnage, tonnage is not really super helpful because it can be inflated by submaximal work that doesn't actually produce the tension that you want for growth. But hard sets are objective, they actually standardize for effort. They standardize for effort. So when we talk about training hard and being close to failure within a few repshire of failure and getting that muscle tension, that is what drives the adaptation we're looking for. And you simply have to have enough of it per week, period. That's rule number one. Very

Rule 2: Train Near Failure

Philip Pape 7:16

important rule. Rule number two proximity to failure then determines a set's effectiveness. So this is going to build on rule one. A set's growth stimulus depends on how close you get to failure. The final reps before failure are often referred to as effective reps. And whether you believe that the reps before them are junk volume or not, all the reps are necessary to get to that point. And those reps toward the end create the most mechanical tension and motor unit recruitment, which is why they tend to be the ones giving you the most stimulus and thus quote unquote effective, not to minimize the other reps. But more and more research supports this idea. And we know this because of supersets, because of myOREPs, because of failure type training, et cetera. And the mechanism is that as you approach failure, your body is forced to recruit more high threshold motor units. And these are primarily fast twitch muscle fibers, and those have the greatest growth potential. And so the guideline here is pretty simple. Just train most of your sets to within one to two reps shy of failure. I'm gonna say for big compound lifts, it might be even three or four. If you're using an RPE scale, that's eight to ten. If you're using RIR, that's zero to two reps left in the tank. Again, bigger lifts can maybe get an extra rep shy from failure. But most of you are probably not even training in that regime anyway, even if you think you are. I'm just gonna be honest. And also, this doesn't mean that every single set has to be a grinder. Sometimes you have to grind, it happens, but it shouldn't be that way for the vast majority of your volume. It should just be highly challenging. So that's rule number two is proximity to failure, is what determines how effective a set is. Rule

Rule 3: Diminishing Returns

Philip Pape 9:00

number three is that more volume equals more growth, but only to a point. There's a dose response relationship between volume and muscle growth. And like any good engineer will tell you, returns diminish past a certain point. Diminishing returns. It's a law of the universe for most things. If you do six sets per week for a muscle group, it's gonna be better than three, but 20 isn't necessarily much better than 15. It might be a tiny bit better, but not much. And then at some point, 20 or 25 or 30 sets might be worse for you because of the overall fatigue for the week and the lack of recovery. The research shows us that hypertrophy plateaus or regresses when volumes get too high, right? 25 to 30 plus sets per week for a single muscle group is to put a number on it. And then you're creating, again, more fatigue than you can recover from. So the practical takeaway is push volume gradually, see how you respond, monetary recovery. You might be a hyperresponder, a lower responder. You might need more or less, right? On average, women need more volume than men. You're gonna need more volume when you're well fed and well nourished than when you're in a fat loss phase, right? So it's gonna be contextual. And more, again, is not always better, especially if it means you can't recover between sessions.

Rule 4: Weekly Set Ranges

Philip Pape 10:14

Rule number four, most lifters thrive on 10 to 25 hard sets per muscle per week. Now that's a big range. And what I usually, if I go on a podcast and somebody asks for, I'll usually say like 10 to 15, because for the average person with the average busy lifestyle, going four days to the gym, it's it's perfectly solid, optimal place to be, or practically optimal place to be, I should say. But the sweet spot is really broad, 10 to 25 sets. And where you fall in that range is gonna depend on your training age, on your ability to recover, and again, your individual responsiveness. So if you're a beginner, just start with 10 to 15. If you're intermediate, you might need 15 to 20. If you're advanced, you might need even more than that, but it's gonna depend on the lift and your recovery and all that, right? And if you spread the volume over multiple sessions per muscle group, so you have maybe upper, lower, upper, lower is a classic split, a four-day split, where you're hitting your biceps and your shoulders and your chest and your back a couple times a week, directly and indirectly, you're gonna get probably better growth because of the frequency and then less fatigue because of the rotation and splitting it up compared to trying to cram it all into one brutal session or just a few sessions. Rule number five the rep range doesn't really matter for hypertrophy, but your effort does. And this might be surprising, right? But I've seen and I've worked like with my coach Andy Baker, he's a genius at this stuff. He will throw

Rule 5: Rep Range Myths

Philip Pape 11:40

in there into his programming, especially the bodybuilding style, tons of different rep ranges. And it almost doesn't seem to make any rhyme or reason until you go a level deep and you look at some of the other training variables, like the order of the lifts and whether it's a big compound lift or not, et cetera. But here's the thing as long as sets are taken with proximity to failure, and again, not total failure, please don't consider this failure training. That is not what I'm saying. In fact, that could be a terrible idea to take everything to failure. We don't want to do that. And there are plenty of people walking around jacked, strong, you know, with great muscle development, that always train several reps away from failure and not to failure. So please. But as long as you do that, muscle growth is going to occur across a wide range of reps. And it kind of makes sense based on what we talked about before. Whether it's five reps or 30 reps, it's getting that tension, right? Getting that fight motor fight, motor fiber recruitment. Research from Schoenfeld, great guy, I like to reference all the time, shows that hypertrophy is pretty much the same whether it's low rep doing three to five reps or high rep doing 25 to 35 when both groups trained close to failure. And so a practical way to do this is use lower reps for compound movements, higher reps for isolation work, and it balances fatigue management with things like joint stress and systemic stress, systemic fatigue, central nervous system fatigue. So the rep range isn't as important as we think, guys. That's my point. But the effort's really important. Rule number

Rule 6: Load-Specific Strength

Philip Pape 13:10

six strength gains are load specific. Okay, so now if you're this is this is giving you a little bit of a break in the last rule in that if your goal includes building maximal strength, not just muscle size, you have to understand that strength gains are load specific. If you want to build maximal strength, you have to lift heavy loads, probably in the one to six rep range. Referring to my episode strength versus hypertrophy, we talked about roughly 65% of your max and higher gets you into that strength regime, which then by definition gets you into these lower reps. And that's going to improve your neurological or neuromuscular adaptation, which is like the coordination between and within your muscles that connects to your nervous system and your brain, and your movement patterns. So if you're focused on both hypertrophy and strength, you're you're going to want to have a mix of the two. And that's why I like methods like top set back off, where you start with a heavy set in, say, four to six, and then you drop the weight 10%, maybe, and then you go, you know, eight to 10. And that's where you then accumulate volume. Um, I ran, I've run several programs that were set-based, that were volume-based, that did a great job of going sub-maximal to accumulate the volume, and then going heavy to push up the numbers and the strength peak, right? And that's this philosophy. All right, so just a quick break here.

Program Support And Templates

Philip Pape 14:31

We're talking about programming a lot. We're talking about strategically thinking about how you lift. We're talking about principles. This is what we teach inside physique university. And that's why I think it's so important. We get into the nitty-gritty of each of these separately in chunks that are easy to digest and think about. And the new tier I just talked about at 27 a month is going to give you access to not only the training templates that apply these principles, but the whole course library that breaks down the science behind these decisions. And of course, access to me and our other coach and the community. And remember that podcast listeners get a custom nutrition plan free if you join by the end of July. Please take advantage of this. It'd be silly not to at the new low price and getting that for free. Use the link in the show notes. People pay a lot more for this stuff, and you're getting it as part of a community because I want it to be accessible and affordable. So check that out. Wits and weights physique university, 27 a month, free nutrition

Rule 7: Periodize Your Volume

Philip Pape 15:24

plan. If you use the link in the show notes, all right, let's get to rule number seven, which is to periodize volume over time for long-term gains. So you want to periodize your volume. Ah, well, we've heard of periodization before. We talk about that in the nutrition context. But when it comes to muscle building, it's not going to be a line. It's not going to be a straight line. You're not going to just grow linearly and, you know, pack on two pounds of muscle a week, a month forever. Well, a week would be nice, a month forever. And then training shouldn't be linear either. Once you get past the novice linear progression, which even itself isn't always perfectly quote unquote linear, right? Because the load doesn't necessarily go up the same from session to session. Your tolerance for volume is going to improve with time. The more you practice the movement patterns, the more tolerance you're going to have. So your body's going to change into a different beast than it was in how you handle volume and how it benefits you. And so cycling between higher and lower volume blocks is going to enhance your adaptation and prevent your burnout. I do this myself. I go between an undulating, periodized, set-based program where I'm packing on lots and lots of submaximal volume, and then I'll switch over to a very minimalist kind of strength program and everything in between, you know, hypertrophy blocks, et cetera. So this would be like if you did six weeks at a pretty high volume, you know, 18, 20 sets a week. And then you switch to what did I say, six weeks or eight weeks at much lower reps, much lower volume, but you're going heavy. And then you're pushing the numbers. And this is going to alternate between the strain you put on your joints, the fatigue you feel physically,

Rule 8: Recovery Sets The Ceiling

Philip Pape 17:00

mentally, allows your body to adapt properly. I was going to say supercompensate, but that word is very loaded today. So I'm not going to use that word. But you can adapt and hit weak spots, improve movement patterns, improve hypertrophy, improve strength, improve all of it. Rule number eight: your recovery capacity is going to determine your volume ceiling. This is super important. This is where the engineering piece comes in you've got to figure this out through testing and measuring. Volume is only productive if you can recover from it. And your ceiling depends on your resource stack, your metabolic stack. What is that? That's sleep, that's nutrition, that's carbs, that's your stress level. Yes, even your age, yes, even your training history, your injury history, et cetera. All of that stuff stacked on top of each other is your recovery capacity, even your genetics, even your gender. Because again, I said before, on average, women tend to recover better than men and need more volume. In this context, not everything, because women do other, tend to do other things like too much cardio, et cetera. I'm not gonna get into that. I want you to watch for the warning signs of what we call overreaching. Okay, none of you have to worry about overtraining. It's just not gonna happen. But overreaching, this is where you have soreness that's persistent, it doesn't go away. This is the poor sleep. You'll you never feel like you can get enough. This is where you don't feel motivated, right? So mentally you're not there. Your regression, your performance regresses, okay? And if you see any of these signs, your volume has exceeded your recovery capacity. And of course, it's gonna get exacerbated when you are depriving yourself of calories. And maybe you're doing it on purpose in a fat loss phase, or maybe you're doing it because you're not quite confident yet in how to eat and how much to eat, or you don't know what your metabolism is, and so you're under-eating without realizing it. Even if you're not losing weight, you still could be under-eating. So, what you want to do here is pick a baseline that's reasonable and then increase your volume gradually and assess your recovery. Measure your biofeedback, measure your energy, your recovery. You could just use a one to 10 scale and say,

Rule 9: Cut Junk Volume

Philip Pape 19:02

what am I this week? Am I a three? Am I a seven? Am I a six? And correlate it with the other things you're doing and your whole metabolic, your stress stack, your sleep, your nutrition, your stress, your blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All right. You can use RPE tracking if you want. You can use other biohacking metrics or biometrics like HRV, you know, if you have an aura ring. You could just use subjective scores like we talked about with the biofeedback. Really up to you. In physique university, we have what's called a biofeedback and physique tracker, and it has a bunch of these laid out for you with a drop-down for scores, and it's lined up with your measurements. So you can kind of track week after week how these are trending against all the other things, and then voila, you understand your recovery capacity. All right, rule number nine out of 12 junk volume sabotages progress. Now, I was hesitant to even use this word or this phrase, but I'm gonna define. Define it. And I think in this definition, it is a real thing. And that is sets that are too easy, sets that are too far from failure, or sets that are poorly executed, that all they're doing to you is they're adding fatigue without giving you the benefit of the adaptation. Notice that I said sets. I

Rule 10: Compound Vs Isolation

Philip Pape 20:20

didn't say reps because I don't believe there's junk reps. I think even if you're doing 20 reps, the first 10 reps aren't junk. There's a benefit to those. Whole different topic for another day. I'm talking about sets. If you do a set that is just too easy, and I'm talking far submaximal or nowhere close to failure, and unless that was your intent for some other reason, other training variable like speed work, for example, it's not going to give you a benefit, right? If a set is poorly executed, even if it feels hard, it's not going to give you benefit because you're probably compensating or you're going to twinge or tweak something, you're going to injure yourself, you're not going to get the direct benefit you're going for, right? And that's a problem too. And that could even come from loading up too heavy, like beyond what you could actually handle right now and ego lifting. Every set should have a purpose, right? Get rid of those filler sets that aren't doing it for you. Right. If you're doing, if your program calls for four sets and three of those sets are junk, you're probably better off with two really hard sets or a hard top set and a hard back off set. In fact, I like it for that reason for many people. It saves time and it gives you the mental fortitude to push toward failure because you know it's only two sets and it's two different weights. It's a great strategy, guys, if you want to try it. Right.

Rule 11: Track Progress Smartly

Philip Pape 21:35

And remember the warm-up sets, that is just for preparation and warming up. That doesn't that's not for accumulating the volume. The volume comes to the working sets. All right, rule number 10 is that compound lifts demand fewer sets and isolation work. This should go by definition by definition, but let me explain what I mean. Compound movements that use multiple joints recruit multiple muscle groups, they generate higher systemic fatigue. They require thus fewer sets per muscle group to be effective, period. Right? Three sets of barbell squats are gonna sufficiently stimulate quads, glutes, hamstrings, but you're probably gonna need maybe four, five, six sets of bicep curls or leg extensions to create the same growth stimulus because the isolation movements create lower systemic fatigue and of course are just hitting those muscle groups. So don't go crazy with your sets for your big lifts, is all I'm saying, especially something like a deadlift. You know, sometimes one set could be enough, one or two sets. It depends on, depends on your goals, depends on the rep range, et cetera. Rule number 11, I want you to track progress, not just volume, because volume is just it's a variable and it's a tool. And honestly, I don't even track it per se. I guess the way I would put it is that a program should be written inherently to add sets or add volume if that's the point, but then it's written in for you. You're not like winging it

Rule 12: Individualize And Landmarks

Philip Pape 23:00

and saying, oh, maybe I'm gonna add another set today and I'm gonna progress in sets. It's not like that. I think reps are a little more on the fly, load is a little more on the fly. Although, again, you still want to be intentional about thinking, what did I do last time? What's my capability now? How am I feeling in my warm-up? You know, what should I be able to uh express today? But volume is more fixed into the program, if that makes sense. If anybody disagrees, let me know. I've never understood anyone who, not understood, I've never heard of anybody who says, I think I'm just gonna add extra sets today. Okay, now I actually take that back a little bit because for isolation work, you might have in your program, you know, do anywhere from four to six sets of these bicep curls. And then it's kind of a choice, right? But even then, I would recommend picking one and sticking with it as you progress for the next block, right? Like if it's four to six in your program, go it, pick one, like five, and do five every time. This is in contrast to a set progression-based program that says, okay, we're gonna go three sets and four sets and five sets, then we're gonna reset at a higher load and go three sets and four sets and five sets. That's different. So, yes, you should probably limit adjusting one variable at a time, and that's usually load or reps. It could be both. It's rarely, I'm going to say, volume, but you will adjust volume over longer blocks of time. And you will also be trying to get better at doing hard sets. That can definitely, I'll say, progress. And when you move to a new movement, let's say six weeks later, you rotate out of movement. It is not uncommon that that first session, you're not quite optimal. And so you're gonna become more efficient the next few sessions. That makes sense. All right, rule number 12, the last rule for today is that volume is individual. You have to experiment and adjust. There is no one size fits all number for volume. There just isn't. I don't care. Look at all the research, and it's all over the place. Genetics, muscle fiber type, lifestyle, stress, food, all the things we talked about influence your volume tolerance and needs, and your own volume ability will change with your training age, with how you've trained, with your fatigue, et cetera. Fat loss, muscle building in terms of your diet. So start with the guidelines I give you today and then tweak it and test it. If you're trying to figure out what volume works for you and you have a range like we

Closing Guidance And CTA

Philip Pape 25:20

talked about, if there's a four to six, start at four. Start at four and then do that a couple weeks. Then go to five, see how that makes you feel, then potentially go to six, right? And see where it goes. You know, if if I don't know, if you get a better pump, if the soreness is manageable, if your lifts progress, you feel like you're in the sweet spot, great. That's where we're trying to get to. Now there's a really cool concept in the research called volume landmarks. Not sure if you've heard of this. And research suggests that there are three of these: your minimum effective volume, your maximum adaptive volume, and your maximum recoverable volume. And this is a more advanced thing. I'm just going to touch on it real quickly, but this has to do with periodizing your training. Your minimum effective volume is the smallest amount that produces growth. Your maximum adaptive volume is that sweet spot where you get the best gains, right? So it's not, it's a higher volume than your minimum, and it gives you the most gains, but then your maximum recoverable volume is the upper limit before you start going backward. So the magic here happens when you can identify those landmarks for you. So it's really just the range and the sweet spot in the middle, right? What's the lowest, what's the highest, what's the sweet spot in the middle? And then you can push up toward that maximum to get even more gains, but with diminishing returns if you have a high recoverability. Conversely, if you have a low recoverability, you might need to get closer to your minimum effective volume, like for example, a fat loss phase. It's pretty cool when you can kind of identify that and intuitively feel it out over time. So training volume, I don't think it has to be this mysterious, complicated thing that requires years of trial and error and being a master programmer to figure it out. I think your body's gonna tell you what's going on. And I think you just can't jump all over the place. You have to be systemic and take your time and be patient, stick with one thing for a while, document what's going on, change a variable, try it again, you know, whether it's your frequency or the volume, and just be an engineer about it. You have inputs, you have outputs, you have feedback mechanisms, use them systematically, and you're gonna be good. You're gonna be good. But if you need help, that's what other people are for. And you know what? Having people to lean on to get form checks to talk about programming accelerates your results. So definitely join us in the new Wits and Weights Physique University. Again, just 27 per month. That's a steal. Um, you get access to training templates, the principles, lifting lessons. You get all the stuff on nutrition, our whole course library. I mean, there's a lot of stuff in there, guys. I don't even want to over overwhelm you, but there are courses on macros, on metabolism, on calories, on menopause, on mindset. I'm working on a couple courses on how to use AI and how to set up your nutrition phases. There's just more and more coming in with lots of great people in there, super smart, trying to help each other out. And don't forget that you as a podcast listener get an exclusive bonus today of a custom nutrition plan absolutely free instead of paying the add-on. If you join by the end of July and use the special link in the show notes. If you want to stop guessing, if you want to get clarity on all this stuff, join us. We'll help you out. Until next time, keep using your weights. Actually, keep using your wits, lifting your weights. And remember that volume without intelligence is fatigue. But volume with the 12 rules I talked about today is how you get some serious muscle growth. I'm gonna talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.