If you want to know exactly how many sets and reps you should be doing in your workouts, this article is for you.
Getting to the gym can be enough of a struggle.. but figuring out how many sets and reps you should be doing?
Nobody has time for that!
That’s why I’ve written everything out for you in today’s article.
By the end, you’ll know exactly how many sets and reps you should be doing in your workouts.
Let’s get started.
What’s your goal?
Before I can give you an answer to how many sets and reps you should be doing in your workouts, you need to define your goals.
There are three main goals you can achieve by strength training:
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- Muscular strength is when your muscles contract with more force, allowing you to lift heavier than you could before.
- Muscular hypertrophy is growing your muscles bigger.
- Muscular endurance is the ability for your muscles to produce force for longer than you were previously able to.
Each goal is going to require a different set and rep range.
This is because in training, there is a principle called specificity.
Very simply, the workouts you do must be specific to your goal.
It should be pretty obvious. If you want bigger glutes, doing bicep curls is not going to be very helpful!
In this case, specificity means that in order to reach a particular goal, you need to be working out in the right set and rep ranges.
However, these goals are not mutually exclusive.
What I mean is that just because you are training for muscle hypertrophy doesn’t mean you won’t get stronger or increase your muscular endurance.
Just because your main goal is to increase your muscular endurance doesn’t mean you won’t get stronger and put on some muscle as well.
Even if your main goal is strength, you can still put on some muscle and increase your muscular endurance to a degree.
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What if my goal is to lose fat?
You might notice that one goal in particular is not on that list.. And that goal is fat loss!
The reason that goal isn’t on the list is because fat loss happens when you’re in a calorie deficit, not because of the workouts you do.
In fact, there really isn’t such a thing as a “fat burning” workout or a workout plan that’s designed to make you lose fat.
While doing workouts does burn calories, it’s not as many as you might think.
You’re going to be better off creating a calorie deficit from your diet.
As long as you’re in a calorie deficit, you will lose weight, regardless of the type of workouts you are doing in the gym.
Your workouts should be focused on building strength and muscle.
When you lose weight, you want as much of that weight to be from fat, not muscle.
Keeping your muscle as you lose weight is going to make you look better. Muscle is what’s going to give girls a butt and toned legs, and guys a chest and defined shoulders.
Muscle is also going to increase your metabolic rate. The more muscle you have, the more calories you’ll burn at rest because muscle burns more calories than fat.
So, if your goal is to lose weight, make sure you’re eating in a caloric deficit and focus your workouts on building strength and muscle.
What are sets and reps?
It’s going to be helpful to actually define what sets and reps are before we continue.
A repetition is how many times you perform an exercise.
Let’s say you’re doing barbell squats.
If you squat down and stand up 5 times, that would be 5 repetitions.
After you perform 5 reps, you’re going to need to take a rest to let your body recover.
Once you’ve finished resting, you perform another 5 reps of squats. Each time you perform 5 reps is a set of that exercise.
Let’s say you perform 3 sets of 5 reps of barbell squats. Here’s what that would look like in a workout program:
3 sets of 5 reps
*Rest 3-5 minutes between sets
So you would perform 5 barbell squats, then rest 3-5 minutes.
Once your rest is up, you would perform another 5 barbell squats.
After resting 3-5 minutes, you would perform a final 5 reps of barbell squats, then rest 3-5 minutes.
You would then move on to the next exercise in your workout!
Improving muscular strength
If your goal is to increase your strength, you’re going to need to pick up some heavy weights!
This is because if you want to get stronger, there are several adaptations in your body that need to happen.
Neurological adaptations
These adaptations take place between your nervous system and your muscles.
When you decide you want to pick up a weight, your brain sends a message to your muscles, telling them to contract.
Your muscles are made up of cells called muscle fibers. When your brain sends a message to a muscle, it can interact with hundreds or thousands of these muscle fibers, forcing them to contract.
You can increase your strength by improving how well your nervous system communicates with your muscles and muscle fibers.
There are two main types of neurological adaptations that help you get stronger:
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- Intermuscular coordination is how different muscles work together. For example, when you perform a barbell squat, your quads, hamstrings and glutes all work together to help you lift the barbell.
- Intramuscular coordination is how well the individual muscle fibers that make up a single muscle work together. In the barbell squat example, intramuscular coordination would be how well all the muscle fibers in your quad muscles work together.
When you strength train, you can improve both intermuscular and intramuscular coordination by improving how well your muscles and muscle fibers work together.
Muscular adaptations
These types of adaptations occur inside the actual muscle fibers.
There are two main types of muscular adaptations that will make you stronger.
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- Muscular growth is the increase in the size of the muscle fibers and the muscle itself. We’ll get more into this when we talk about sets and reps for muscle growth, but muscle growth does play a part in helping you get stronger.
- Fiber type changes can occur inside a muscle. You have two major types of muscle fibers: fast twitch and slow twitch fibers. Fast twitch fibers contract quickly while slow twitch fibers contract slowly (shocking, I know). When you lift heavy, you change some of your slow fibers into fast twitch fibers, which will help you lift heavier weights.
Sets and reps for muscular strength
In order for these adaptations to occur, you need to lift relatively heavy weights. Using light weights for lots of reps just won’t cut it!
To lift heavy weights, you’re going to need to lift lower repetitions.
Think about it logically.. The less reps you do, the heavier weight you can lift, right?
Generally, when training for strength, you want to perform anywhere from 3-5 sets of 1-5 repetitions.
There are many ways you can do this, and there really isn’t a right or wrong way to go about it.
Here are some examples:
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- 3 sets of 5 reps
- 5 sets of 5 reps
- 4 sets of 5 reps
- 5 sets of 3 reps
For the most part, I usually don’t program lower than 3 reps unless someone is specifically training for a powerlifting meet where the goal is to lift as much weight as possible for a single repetition.
The risk isn’t really worth the reward, and you can get strong as hell in the 3-5 rep range.
Building muscle
When your goal is to build muscle, there are 3 mechanisms that build muscle which should be included in your workouts.
Mechanical tension
Mechanical tension is a type of stretching force on your muscles. It occurs when you’re lifting a weight that produces a lot of force on your muscle fibers (1).
In order for this force to be great enough to produce muscle growth, you need to be using weights that challenge you.
Most of the time, if your goal is to build muscle, you should be using weights that you could not do more than 1-3 reps with.
How do you know if you’re using weights that challenge you?
Let’s say you’re performing a set of dumbbell bench presses.
In order for that set to create enough mechanical tension to make your muscles grow, your last few reps should slow down dramatically.
If your last few reps are the same speed as your first few reps, you probably need to increase the weight you’re using!
Recently, research has shown that mechanical tension is likely the most important mechanism when it comes to building muscle (2).
You can lift weights that challenge you across a wide variety of rep ranges. Typically heavier weights are going to be easier to create mechanical tension with.
However, you can still create mechanical tension with lighter weights performed close to failure.
Metabolic stress
Metabolic stress is the accumulation of metabolites in your muscles (1). Metabolites are the byproducts, or waste, of your muscles producing energy to contract.
The best way to describe metabolic stress is the burning sensation you feel when working out.
You’re not really going to experience this burning sensation unless you’re lifting weights for higher reps.
It’s kind of unclear at this point whether or not metabolic stress contributes to muscle growth.
Some research shows that it’s probably a contributing factor while some shows that it doesn’t add any benefit over mechanical tension.
For example, blood flow restriction studies have shown an improvement in muscular strength without high amounts of mechanical tension (3). By reducing blood flow to the area, there is an increase in the amount of metabolites in the area, which leads to a high amount of metabolic stress.
In another study, trainees were split into two groups. One group performed workouts that emphasized metabolic stress and the second group did workouts that were very low in metabolic stress.
The high metabolic stress group performed 4 sets of 10 leg extensions with 30 seconds of rest to maximize the buildup of metabolites. The low fatigue group did 40 sets of a single repetition with 30 seconds rest between each rep.
At the end of the study, both groups gained similar amounts of strength with no meaningful difference between groups (4).
With that being said, it doesn’t hurt to include some higher rep training to induce some metabolic stress if your goal is to build muscle.
Muscle damage
If you’ve ever been very sore after working out, you’ve experienced muscle damage!
Muscle damage happens when your muscle fibers go through significant stress, and experience microtears (1).
It was once thought that muscle damage was the main cause of muscle growth.
You’ve probably heard it said that by working out, you’re tearing your muscles down and building them up bigger.
That’s not quite the whole story.
Muscle damage is definitely something that occurs, but it’s not really clear if it adds any benefit over mechanical tension and metabolic stress.
The authors of a review paper on muscle damage and muscle growth concluded the following:
“Thus, we conclude that muscle damage is not the process that mediates or potentiates resistance training-induced muscle hypertrophy.” (5)
In other words, the authors reached the conclusion that muscle damage doesn’t cause muscle growth.
What this means is that you don’t need to be sore to the point where you can’t sit on the toilet after working out.
However, if you’re never getting sore from your workouts, it could be a sign that you’re not raining hard enough or close enough to failure to see results.
Sets and reps for building muscle
The classic answer for the amount of reps to build muscle is 6-12 reps.
It was once thought that lower rep ranges (1-5 reps) and higher rep ranges (12+ reps) were not as effective for building muscle.
This is not really true.
There is research showing that sets as low as 3 reps (6) and as high as 35 reps (7, 8) can both build muscle as well as the classic 6-12 rep range.
The most important variable for building muscle is training close to failure, regardless of how many reps you perform.
So, does that mean that the 6-12 rep range is meaningless?
Not quite.
If we look at things practically, 6-12 reps still makes the most amount of sense when looking to maximize building muscle.
To build muscle, it appears there is a total amount of challenging sets per week that need to be done. You can’t just do one set of 5 bicep curls per week and expect to get jacked!
You need to be doing somewhere between 10-20 challenging sets per muscle per week to build muscle (9).
If you were to perform 10-20 sets of low rep exercises, they would take a massive toll on your joint health. Imagine doing that many sets per week of heavy 3 rep bicep curls.. I guarantee your elbow joints will be hurting in a few weeks!
On the other hand, performing very high repetition sets isn’t going to be very efficient either.
Remember that you need to train close to failure to build muscle. If you’ve never taken a 20 rep set of barbell squats to failure, just know that you’ll probably be puking your brains out afterwards. Try doing that for 10-20 sets per week!
It’s also a lot harder to judge how close to failure you are when doing high repetition sets. You’re going to be breathing hard and want to stop, but you might still be far away from muscular failure.
Occasionally including some high repetition exercises can be a good idea for building muscle, but they shouldn’t make up the majority of your workout.
Higher repetition sets can give your joints a break and contribute to more metabolic stress, which if you remember is likely to be a contributor to muscle growth.
Some exercises simply lend themselves to different rep ranges better.
Compound exercises like squats, bench presses and deadlifts tend to work better in the 6-8 rep range. Going high reps on these exercises is going to make you want to puke and it’s probably going to work your cardiovascular system more than your muscles.
Isolation exercises like bicep curls, hamstring curls and tricep extensions tend to feel better on your joints in the 10-12 rep range.
You can (and should) divide the 10-20 sets per week among a few different exercises. In other words, I wouldn’t just do 10 sets of the same exercise per week if your goal is to build muscle.
Why?
You should work muscles at different lengths and through different ranges of motion in order to see the best results. Different exercises stress different regions of your muscles. By using multiple exercises as opposed to just one, you can build a more balanced physique.
Simply put, you want to use different exercises to work the same muscle group.
So to build muscle, you’re generally going to want to do 2-4 sets of 6-12 reps.
As a practical example, let’s say you wanted to build muscle in your glutes and you are going to do two lower body days per week.
You could pick a barbell squat and a Bulgarian split squat on day one, and a Romanian deadlift and a single leg hip thrust on day two.
By doing 3 sets of 6-12 reps each, you would be at 12 sets per week, right in the 10-20 set per week range.
Improving muscular endurance
This section is going to be the shortest because to be honest, most people really don’t care that much about muscular endurance.
Unless you’re a marathon runner looking to improve your performance, most people don’t have the goal of improving muscular endurance.
When you strength train for muscular endurance, you are improving how efficiently you muscles use energy, and you are improving your muscle’s tolerance to the byproducts that build up when your muscles produce energy (10).
Basically, you’re training your muscles to be more efficient and you’re delaying that burning sensation you feel when lifting weights for high repetitions.
Sets and reps for improving muscular endurance
For the most part, 2-3 sets of 12+ repetitions are going to improve your muscular endurance (11).
Don’t skip this!
If your goal is to build muscle and get stronger, you need to incorporate progressive overload into your workouts.
Progressive overload simply means making something more difficult over time.
In terms of your workouts, you need to be trying to improve each week.
Whether you’re trying to add weight to the bar, or perform one more rep than the previous week, progressive overload is extremely important!
It’s actually much more important than the exact rep set and rep range you do.
Continually improving week after week is what is going to lead to you getting stronger and building muscle.
The amount of sets and rep ranges you do will put you in the right direction.
But without training hard enough and making your workout more difficult over time, you’re going to be spinning your wheels without getting anywhere.
Wrapping up
So there you have it.
Now you know exactly how many sets and how many reps you should be doing to reach your goal.
Here’s a quick recap of set and rep ranges:
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- To get stronger, use 3-5 sets of 1-5 reps (usually only 3-5 reps).
- To build muscle, do 2-4 sets of 6-12 reps.
- To improve your muscular endurance, 2-3 sets of 12+ reps is a good place to be.
If you want someone to take care of everything for you, and create a program that is designed to get you to your goal, you can apply for coaching to see if we’d be a good fit for each other.
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