Guide
How many sets per muscle group per week?
For muscle growth, aim for roughly 10–20 hard sets per muscle group per week. Beginners grow on the lower end (about 10–12); experienced lifters usually need more. Below roughly 10 hard sets, most trained lifters are maintaining, not building — which is exactly why so many people train five days a week and stay the same size.
What counts as a hard set.
Only sets taken close to failure count — within about 1–3 reps of it. Warm-ups don't count. Easy sets don't count. A set of curls you could have done ten more of doesn't count.
Compound lifts count for more than one muscle, but not fully for each: a bench press is a full set for chest and roughly half a set for triceps and front delts. Rows are a full set for back, half for biceps.
Do the math on your own week.
This is where it gets uncomfortable. Take a typical 4-day plan that trains everything: by the time your weekly sets are split across chest, back, quads, hamstrings, glutes, shoulders, biceps, triceps and calves, most muscles land at 6–9 hard sets. Every one of them just under the line.
You have three options: train a lot more (your recovery and schedule will object), accept maintenance everywhere, or concentrate the sets you already do into fewer muscles at a time. The third one is the only version that fits a normal life — 2–3 areas at 12–20 sets each, everything else at maintenance volume, rotating focus as areas catch up.
More isn't always better.
Past ~20 hard sets per muscle per week, most lifters stop getting extra growth and start accumulating fatigue — recovery becomes the bottleneck. Frequency helps here: splitting a muscle's weekly sets across two sessions beats cramming them into one, because sets 7–10 in a single session are junk-quality by the end.
GainBlocks turns this math into a board.
This guide is GainBlocks' whole interface. Every muscle group gets a row of blocks — its weekly hard-set target — and one hard set fills one block. The compound math above is built in: log a bench press and it fills Chest 1, Triceps ½, Front delts ½, exactly the counting rule from this article, done for you at the moment you log.
"Am I doing enough for chest?" stops being a guess — it's a row on a board you can see. Fill the board before Monday and every muscle got its volume, whatever days you trained.