How Many Reps (Sets) For Muscle Growth

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How many sets should you perform for muscle growth. Does the total training intensity, sets, reps and volume accumulated have an optimal answer? In this months issue of MASS Dr. Mike Zourdos reviews a study where participants performed either 16, 24 or 32 sets over an 8 week training block and the results were not that surprising, but could they be better?

Bodybuilders have known intuitively for decades that high volume training is the quickest way to big muscles. When bodybuilding split from Olympic weightlifting in the 1940s, most serious musclemen began training with higher reps and multiple sets (Fair, 1999). It's not because they "felt like it". It's because they saw that it worked.

Exercise science has come a long way since the 1940s. It's no longer a matter of "seeing is believing". We're now able to pinpoint why higher reps and multiple sets work so well at a biological level.

I'll begin by summarising (briefly) how weight training makes muscles grow.

Grow Baby, Grow
Muscle growth (hypertrophy) is caused by a buildup of proteins. Protein buildup can happen in three ways (Booth & Thomason, 1991):

The amount of protein going into the muscle increases
The amount of protein wasted from the muscle decreases
Both 1 and 2
Weight training causes microtrauma (tiny tears in muscle fibres)(McDonagh et al, 1984; Gibala et al, 2000). The body responds to the damage by increasing the amount of protein going into the muscles. This continues for up to two days after weight training (Gibala et al, 1995b).

The rate of repair and muscle growth is also positively affected by testosterone and other hormones (Kraemer et al, 1990; Adams, 1998). Weight training increases the release of these muscle-building hormones in your body (Raastad et al, 2000).

The rate of hypertrophy that occurs during this "healing" process depends on the type of muscle fibre involved. Fast twitch fibres respond better than slow twitch fibres (Alway et al; McCall et al, 1996). Individuals with more fast twitch fibres will grow bigger, quicker.

How To Perform Reps for Most muscle growth!