How Many Sets Do We Need To Do To Get Strong? Thoughts On Navigating The Conundrum

Knowing how much volume is enough to stimulate sufficient strength gains is a contentious subject amongst iron enthusiasts. Sifting through the research into this area will quickly illustrate the heterogeneous nature of the answer to this question, coupled with the indecision of a unified opinion among differing camps within the strength community.

What comes next are my thoughts on how I navigate volume and the reasoning behind it.

Importance of maximal strength in sport performance

The ability to produce force is important for sports performance and aspects of rehabilitation – although I am reticent to suggest it is of fundamental value.

One large meta-analysis of 510 athletes showed a large effect size (- 0.87) for improvements in lower body strength leading to decreases in sprint time of around 3.11% ± 2.27% (r = -0.77; p < 0.001; 95 % CI -0.85 to -0.67) (Seitz et al., 2014). Before we go on, I want to draw your attention to the standard deviation for improvements in sprint performance…

Standard deviation allows us to assess the variability of a group of scores relative to the mean of that group. One standard deviation represents 68.27% (34.1% either side of the mean) of the scores of the data set whereas two standard deviations either side of the mean represent 95.4% of the data set (~47.7% either side of the mean).

So… the greater the standard deviation ie. the closer it is to 2 or even greater than 2 standard deviations above the mean, the larger the variability in individual scores that make up that data set.

Going back to our sprint sample. Two standard deviations would put 95% of our sample decreasing their sprint time by somewhere between 1.63% to 5.59% but the SD of the sample is ± 2.27% so the bounds of the SD are 0.84% to 5.38% which is well above two standard deviations suggesting a very large variability in the effect of strength training on sprint performance.

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Unsurprisingly, there are similar variations in transfer of maximal strength gains to performance in change of direction measures. In a meta-analysis and narrative synthesis by Nygaard Falch et al., in 2019, strength training involving multi-joint exercises (squat variations) resulted in improvements in change of direction performance in the upper and lower bounds of -1.74% and 12.73% respectively (Nygaard Falch et al., 2019). Again, this highlights the heterogenous nature of strength gains and their correspondence to on-the-field performance – for some people, the high transfer guys, increasing strength would appear to have a big impact on their COD but for others it may even have a negative effect!

To be clear, I am not suggesting sufficient strength is not important!

Clearly for some people it is and, in the samples, presented, it resulted in a 5% increase in their sprint capacity a 12% increase in COD performance. But due to the large variability, we probably do not want to put all our efforts into just getting strong if it’s clear that we are not entirely certain it’s going to have a massive impact, this is important when it comes to how much we focus on strength when we only have finite bodily resources and our goal is not strength in of itself!

Keep this in mind going through the remainder of this article!

We could do as little as 3 sets per week for a movement.

There have been many individual papers examining the effects of varying resistance training volume on strength, rather than examine them, lets focus on the synthesises of these papers by several recent reviews published in the last few years.

The meta-analysis by Ralston et al., (2017) had a combined sample size of 223 men with a nearly equal split of trained and untrained prior RT experience and the intensity of the training studies was from 73% to 85% the participants 1-RM. They found that 5 sets were only marginally worse off compared to moderate (5-9 sets / week) and high (10 sets / week); all three conditions had large effect sizes and the difference between the effect sizes of each volume threshold was less than 0.2 of an effect size – trivial by their definition.

There appears to be a similar trend for two other recent review papers. One umbrella review by McLeod et al., (2024) found a small standardised mean difference (same concept as an effect size) between 1 set per exercise versus 2-3 sets performed multiple times per week (SMD 0.25 95% CI 0.14-0.37) and no difference between 4-6 sets or 2-3 sets. Again, when we take a closer look at the effect size, we sit 0.05 above the ‘trivial’ threshold, a cut off that if below would suggest no meaningful effect of differences in volume. Taken further, the confidence intervals for this sample show that 95% of the time the effect of jumping from 1 set to up to 3 sets per exercise had a trivial-to-small effect.

For what could be a double increase in training time, some people may get very little in return on their investment for gains in strength, according to this umbrella review.

Brad Currier and his colleagues published a network meta-analysis in 2023 which paints a clear picture on the impact of volume and its relationship with intensity on markers of strength.

The analysis involved 5097 people. They found 1 set performed once per week, performed at either a low (<80% 1RM) or high (> 80% 1RM) intensity was not enough to stimulate improvements in muscle strength.

Interestingly, on the face of it there was no difference in the relative effect of volume when comparing 3 and 1 set(s) per exercise, 3 times weekly if we look at Table 2, page 7. Staying on the same table and as expected, the relative effects of the high intensity were more pronounced and superior compared to the low intensity across most conditions in the analysis. Although, even with 1 set per exercise at intensities < 80% 1RM, when performed three times weekly it had a large effect on strength compared to the control group!

What I want to stress is that the analysis by Currier found no difference in gains in strength when comparing single versus multi-set movements performed three times weekly. The difference in the relative effect size of the two conditions was 0.1 (this is trivial!) which suggests that you get limited return on investment if you crank out 9 sets per week per movement compared to 3 sets.

But if we take the time to take a closer look at the confidence intervals, things become less clear. Let us compare conditions where intensity and frequency were equal, but volume differed. Take the comparison HS3 vs HM3 −0.38 (−0.86 to 0.11) (total volume 3 versus 9 sets per week). This showed a non-significant small effect size in favour of the 9 sets per week, yet it was non-significant because of the large width of certainty in the confidence intervals. They showed that 95% of the time the effect of the increasing from 3 to 9 sets had either a trivial effect in favour of 3 sets or a large effect in favour of 9 sets!

This is a similar situation with the comparison HM2 versus HS2 −0.44 (−1.00 to 0.14); 95% of the time there was either a small trivial effect in favour of the 2-set group or a large effect in favour of the 6-set group (per week).

Holding volume as a continuous variable as opposed to a categorical variable as in the analysis’ presented above, Pelland et al., (2024) reported that between 2-4 sets per week showed the highest efficiency in their meta-regression model for improving strength gains, and likely that beyond 5 weekly sets yielded little benefit.

Taken together, it seems we can do at least 2-3 sets per week and get a large relative effect on improvements in strength when compared to no training at all but increasing from 2-3 to 5- 9 sets per week and beyond, the inter-individual response to varying volumes increases substantially.

I want to stress here, that for some people, pushing into the higher weekly volume would be hugely beneficial, for others, not so much. Again, we are talking about the relationship between strength and volume… not hypertrophy. That is an entirely different beast (and article!).

Navigating the variable responses to volume: Load, assess, titrate and repeat.

Hopefully by now you are convinced that we could do as little as 2-3 sets per week with a broad spectrum of working intensity and still get strong but less certain on the answer to the next question, knowing how much is going to give us the most bang for our buck?

I like things simple; this works well in a busy clinic environment where you must think on your feet a great deal. The method? It is one of trial and error. We are all individuals and will respond rather uniquely to any stress on our systems. To account for the ambiguity of knowing where our volume goal posts are, I stress starting at the bottom of the volume threshold, loading up, assessing the changes in strength and changing as necessary depending on your goals or those of your clients and patients’. If you only lift to get strong for the sake of health, then you can probably stay low. If you are a keen lifter then you can change it as you see fit but again, track your gains relative to your volume. There really is little point pushing the volume up further if you have already hit the inflection point on your volume-gains relationship (see below!).

If our goal is sports performance, navigation becomes even more nuanced. It seems whilst strength (or high-force output characteristics) is important for performance, there is great variability in how much it transfers for each athlete. If you had Joe who was low threshold responder and only needs a small amount of volume to get large gains that correspond to notable changes in performance markers, then you are in luck. You might find you can get away with 2-3 sets of high intensity work per week. But for Adam who is the high(er) threshold responder and is needing more volume to push their numbers up, you need to find their inflection point. 

The inflection point on a graph is the point where further increases in in the x-value (volume) do not yield more gains in the y-value (strength or performance markers) compared to the previous value of x, see figure below.

Therefore, the smallest amount to get the largest return (on performance markers) is marked by the inflection point where any further increases in volume does not yield the same magnitude of increase in performance compared to the previous volume. This would take time to find out, it is not something that you could tease out in a 12-week block. This is probably going to take a few cycles to find your inflection point for volume-strength gains (if you want to that is…).

For the athlete or the clinician working with athletes, knowing this approximate threshold is really useful as you can then devote all other sessions (and finite bodily resources) to focus on other aspects that carry over to performance. These could include game theory, skills-based practises, psychology etc without strength work eating unnecessarily into their recovery capacity and affecting the other key and often more important areas of their practise.

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References

Seitz, L. B., Reyes, A., Tran, T. T., de Villarreal, E. S., & Haff, G. G. (2014). Increases in lower-body strength transfer positively to sprint performance: a systematic review with meta-analysis. Sports medicine, 44, 1693-1702.

Nygaard Falch, H., Guldteig Rædergård, H., & van den Tillaar, R. (2019). Effect of different physical training forms on change of direction ability: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Sports medicine-open, 5, 1-37.

Androulakis-Korakakis, P., Fisher, J. P., & Steele, J. (2020). The minimum effective training dose required to increase 1RM strength in resistance-trained men: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Sports Medicine, 50(4), 751-765.

Ralston, G. W., Kilgore, L., Wyatt, F. B., & Baker, J. S. (2017). The effect of weekly set volume on strength gain: a meta-analysis. Sports Medicine, 47, 2585-2601.

Currier, B. S., Mcleod, J. C., Banfield, L., Beyene, J., Welton, N. J., D'Souza, A. C., ... & Phillips, S. M. (2023). Resistance training prescription for muscle strength and hypertrophy in healthy adults: a systematic review and Bayesian network meta-analysis. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 57(18), 1211-1220.

Mcleod, J. C., Currier, B. S., Lowisz, C. V., & Phillips, S. M. (2024). The influence of resistance exercise training prescription variables on skeletal muscle mass, strength, and physical function in healthy adults: An umbrella review. Journal of sport and health science, 13(1), 47-60.

Pelland, J., Remmert, J., Robinson, Z., Hinson, S., & Zourdos, M. (2024). The Resistance Training Dose-Response: Meta-Regressions Exploring the Effects of Weekly Volume and Frequency on Muscle Hypertrophy and Strength Gain.