Welcome to Sunday Coffee 🙂
If you’d like to catch todays edition on Youtube, I’ve linked the video below.
How often should you train to build muscle?
How much you train can make or break your results in the gym.
Train too much - you risk overtraining and hurting yourself.
Train too little - you risk not seeing any results.
There’s a whole lot of conflicting information out there about how much you should be hitting the gym if you’re trying to build muscle.
You pull up Instagram and see some world class bodybuilders hitting it 6-7 days a week for 3 hours and think you should do the same!
But turns out that most steroids (yes professional bodybuilders are all using steroids, it’s part of the game) drastically increase your ability to recover - so no, you shouldn’t be training as often as they are.
This is just a small example of how everyone’s situation is different.
When thinking about your own optimal training schedule, you have to be conscious of your:
experience
age
injury history
profession and daily life (lifestyle)
sleep
So with that said, there have been tons of studies done on this subject - and the TLDR of what they’ve found is this:
If you want to build muscle, you should aim for…
10-20 working sets per muscle group each week (note: if you’re very advanced, you may exceed 20 sets and see results)
You should aim for 4-6 sets per exercise “as it seems gains will plateau beyond this set range and may even regress due to overtraining.”
Some data suggests that its better to train muscle groups 2x per week to allow for more rest between training sessions for that specific muscle group - which in turn allows for more intensity during training as the muscle group is less tired
You should also be resting a ton - because rest is where the growth actually happens.
An example training schedule
Let’s say you want to train 4 days per week. You could divide your training up in a lot of different ways…
4 full body days
2 upper days + 2 lower days
Push, Pull, Quads/Hamstrings, Glutes/Calves
Let’s take a look at #2 here for our example.
You’re aiming for 10-20 working sets per muscle group, lifting 4 days per week. The main muscle groups most people focus on are the Chest, Back, Shoulders, Arms, Legs and Core.
You can further subdivide these, and you should (specifically for your legs) - but for now, these are what we’ll stick with. For each exercise you’d perform 4-6 sets of 5-12 reps.
Upper day 1:
Chest: 2 exercises (Bench press and Flies)
Back: 2 exercises (Pull Ups and Rows)
Shoulders: 2 exercises (Military Press and Lateral Raises)
Lower Day 1:
Quads: 2 exercises (Hack Squat and Leg Extensions)
Hamstrings: 2 exercises (RDL’s and Leg Curls)
Glutes: 2 exercises (Bulgarian split squats and Hip Thrusts)
Upper Day 2:
Back: 2 exercises (Shrugs and Hyperextensions)
Chest: 1 exercises (Incline Bench Press)
Arms: 3 exercises (Preacher Curls, Tricep Rope Extensions, Dips)
Lower Day 2:
Calves: 2 Exercises (single leg elevated calf raise and machine calf raises)
Quads/Hamstrings: 2 exercises (Leg Press and Goblet Squats)
Glutes: 1 exercise (Step-Ups)
So there’s a working example of what this might look like, but every muscle group will then be getting between 10-20 working sets.
This will also be our workouts for the following week of Sunday Coffee, with a 5th day thrown in for cardio and some core training 🙂
So today we did a quick rundown of optimal training volume to build muscle, next week we’ll be covering optimal training intensity to build muscle - in other words,
how to decide how heavy you should be lifting
how many reps you should be doing
and how hard your workouts should be
ps: Like I said on Friday, I know the format change happened pretty quickly. We went from 1 newsletter per week to 6.
So if you’re not interested in receiving the workouts M-F, please just let me know in the poll below and I’ll be sure to only send you the weekly newsletter!
And if you don’t want to receive either anymore, go ahead and hit the ‘unsubscribe’ button at the bottom of this email - no hard feelings.
How do you feel about the new format of sunday coffee?
Resources
Resistance Training Volume is the Key to Muscle Size - Zachary Mang, M.S., Juliet St. Germain, and Len Kravitz, Ph.D.