Sets Per Muscle Group Per Week Chart

This is the lookup version of the question: one table, weekly sets per muscle group, with the source of each row named so you can see how much weight it carries. If you would rather have your own number computed, the calculator below does the arithmetic.

The reference chart

Weekly sets per muscle	What it is	Where the number comes from
About 6	Enough to hold what you have	Coaching model (RP), not a trial
Under 5	Lowest band studied; still grows muscle	Schoenfeld 2017, three-band split
5 to 9	Middle band	Schoenfeld 2017, three-band split
10 or more	Highest band studied	Schoenfeld 2017, three-band split
12 to 20	Standard target for a trained lifter	Baz-Valle 2022, seven trials
Over 20	No added benefit for quads or biceps; triceps did gain	Baz-Valle 2022

Read the third column before you use the second. The rows are not equally solid.

What each row is worth

The three bands are softer than they look. Schoenfeld, Ogborn and Krieger pooled 34 treatment groups from 15 studies. Their strong findings were continuous: weekly sets as a number predicted growth at P = 0.002, worth roughly 0.37% more gain per set, and the higher-volume arm beat the lower-volume arm within studies at P = 0.03. The famous under-5 / 5-to-9 / 10-plus split is the paper’s weakest analysis, reported as a trend at P = 0.074. It is a convenient way to talk about volume, not a demonstrated set of thresholds.

The 12 to 20 target is narrower than it looks. Baz-Valle’s review kept only seven trials, all in men aged 18 to 35 with at least a year of training, using direct measurement of muscle thickness or cross-sectional area. Within that population the recommendation is well argued. Outside it — women, older lifters, true novices — it is an extrapolation.

The maintenance row is not a study at all. The roughly-6-sets figure for holding muscle comes from Renaissance Periodization’s volume landmarks, a commercial programming framework. Useful, but it belongs in a different evidence tier from the two rows above it, which is exactly why the chart labels it.

Why there is no separate row for chest, back and quads

Because the meta-analyses did not build one. They group results by “muscle group” generically, since the underlying trials measured different sites with different methods and rarely set out to compare body parts. Any chart that hands you a different number for shoulders than for hamstrings is reporting a coach’s judgment, not a pooled result.

The one crack of daylight is Baz-Valle’s top-end split, where the triceps benefited from going above 20 weekly sets and the quadriceps and biceps did not. One review, three muscles — enough to suspect the right dose varies by site, not enough to write a per-muscle table from.

Using the chart in four steps

1. List every exercise in your week where a given muscle is the prime mover.
2. Add up the hard sets — sets stopped within a few reps of failure.
3. Find that total in the table and read the row’s source column.
4. If you want to move, move by one or two sets a week and watch performance, not soreness.

Then decide which direction the number should go: down toward the minimum effective volume if recovery is the constraint, or up toward the maximum recoverable volume if it is not. For the goal-specific target rather than the whole table, see sets per week for hypertrophy, and to compute your own total, use the training volume calculator.

This content is informational and does not replace advice from a qualified coach or physician.