Why Volume Can’t Be King

It hasn’t been king and it never will be…

Volume does have its role to play and it is important

But…

It is not all that it’s cracked up to be

There is an upper limit to how much volume can be productive

And…

It’s much lower than what people think

we recently just got a new meta analysis on volume

And it showed that strength gains plateaued out at 4 sets a week

However hypertrophy gains just went up and up and up after that

But…

That doesn’t make sense because it’s blatantly ignoring the physiology of muscle

Muscle’s function is to produce force

You can’t build muscle without an associated increase in strength

It may not be an exact 1:1 ration but there can’t be the addition of new muscle with a 0% increase in strength

Again because that blatantly ignore the basic function of muscle

And the real reason that hypertrophy was shown just to go up and up and up the more sets were done

Was because of edema or swelling of the muscle

It wasn’t that they were building more muscle

It’s just that they were causing so much damage to the muscle and not giving it time to properly recover

And the more sets you did the more swelling you got

It’s as simple as that

So if you want to focus on training for hypertrophy there really is no reason to do more than 4-6 sets a week per muscle group

I hope that clears this up for y’all

And that y’all are having a happy Friday :)

Also if you want to learn more about how to build muscle based on science the feel free to leave a follow

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