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Weekly sets per muscle group calculator
Start from a ready-made split or add each exercise in a client's week. Pick exercises from an exercise library built by a working personal trainer and the muscles fill in for you. The calculator adds up hard sets for every muscle group and compares them with standard hypertrophy volume ranges. Pick an experience level to load a matching target range.
All levels
Weekly sets by muscle group
Shaded band = your target range.Below rangeIn rangeAbove range
About the volume ranges
A "set" here means a hard set, taken within about 0–3 reps of failure. Warm-ups don't count.
Ranges by experience level (pick one above to load it): beginners usually grow well on about 5–10 hard sets per muscle a week; intermediate and advanced lifters usually need about 8–20, with advanced lifters starting nearer the middle. A useful way to think about it: roughly 6 sets a week holds what you have, about 8 is the floor for growth, around 12 is the productive middle, and past about 15 recovery starts to run out for most people. Start a block near the low end and add sets only while lifts keep going up and recovery stays good.
- Below about 10 sets per week: still builds muscle, especially for beginners, but meta-analyses find more growth at higher volumes (Schoenfeld, Ogborn & Krieger, 2017, Journal of Sports Sciences).
- About 10–20 sets per week: the range most evidence-based guidelines recommend for hypertrophy for most trainees.
- Above about 20 sets per week: some advanced lifters benefit, but recovery becomes the limiting factor. Use it for one or two priority muscles at a time, not the whole body.
About the exercise library and presets
The exercise picker uses a library of 64 movements built by a working personal trainer, mostly machine and cable work you'll find in a typical commercial gym. Each one credits one primary muscle group and up to two secondary groups (for example, a chest press counts for chest, with front delts and triceps as secondaries). You can change any muscle by hand, or type your own exercise name.
A few movements don't fit the 12 groups here, so they aren't counted toward muscle volume: farmers walks (a loaded carry that mostly trains grip, traps and core) and the hip adductor machine (inner thighs).
The presets are starting points. The beginner full-body preset lands every counted muscle group inside 5–10 sets a week; full body 3 days, upper/lower 4 days and push/pull/legs 6 days land every group, calves included, inside 10–20. "Sessions / wk" is how many of the week's sessions include that exercise. Want a complete program? The program templates load straight into this calculator.
Using Myo-rep style mini-sets? Count each activation set plus its mini-sets as about 3 sets. Plan them with the mini-set planner.
Muscle mapping is simplified, and this tool is for general programming guidance only.
Research behind this tool
Summaries are in our own words. Links go to the original papers; no author or journal endorses Trainer App Stack.
- Pooling 15 studies, muscle growth rose step by step as weekly sets went up, by roughly a third of a percent for each extra weekly set. Schoenfeld, Ogborn & Krieger 2017, J Sports Sci
- For young trained men, the review suggested about 12–20 weekly sets per muscle as a sensible standard target. Baz-Valle et al. 2022, J Hum Kinet
- Across 67 studies, counting a set for a helper muscle as half a set fit the data best, and growth kept rising with volume but with diminishing returns. That's why secondary muscles count as half a set here. Pelland et al., SportRxiv (preprint, not peer reviewed) · CC BY 4.0, summarized
- In trained men, more sets per exercise led to more muscle growth, while strength gains were similar with 1, 3 or 5 sets. Schoenfeld et al. 2019, Med Sci Sports Exerc