 What's the right amount of volume to build the most amount of muscle watch this our next caller is Steven from North Carolina, Steven What's happening? How can we help you? Hey, how's it going guys good? Congratulations on all your hard work. It's really paying off helping a lot of people. So we appreciate it I'm just gonna go ahead and read this question off because I don't want to sound like a blabbering idiot But it mainly revolves around muscle and strength and And hypertrophy and the amount of volume that's prescribed in max anabolic So you hear all these other guys like Lane Orton and Brad Schoenfeld and Mike Israel tell preach for days and days about how volume is The key for size and strength gains and they all seem to talk about around a 15 to 20 sets per week for any given muscle But when I'm doing maps anabolic, it seems like the most volume you're ever doing for any one body part in particular Is 12 sets and that's assuming that you're doing three days a week And then in some phases like phase one only has like four sets of pull-ups for the lats But um anyways, I ran maps anabolic as written about a year or so back and didn't really see any significant strength gains or size gains Caveat is I was either at maintenance for most of the time or even cutting towards the end of it So I'm not sure if that has something to do with it With all that being said though, I've been lifting and eating really well for Over a year now, and I haven't really seen any size or strength gains significantly Doing any sort of program. So I've kind of come to the conclusion that I probably need to do some sort of legitimate slow and steady bulk in order To gain strength and size at this point but at the end of the day, I'm a little worried that Doing so with a program like maps anabolic I won't have enough volume and that just worries me. I don't want to get fat On my first time really trying to bulk Okay. All right, so there's a couple of things you added in the question that you wrote into do you mind if I go through them? Yeah, go for it. Yeah, so you said you you realize you have a little bit of body dysmorphia Yeah, potentially. Yes. Okay. Now that can make That can make being objective a little bit challenging. Okay. Now you mentioned not a lot of strength gains But you were also cutting your calories. That's common. It's really hard to make strength gains when your calories are low Especially an experienced lifter. Yeah, especially as far as volume is concerned. Okay Here's a deal with with volume and here's the challenge that I have with the science-based Fitness communicators, although they're far better than the typical Fitness influencer. They are all about the data and they tend to miss out the context of individual variants because they themselves Often don't train lots of everyday people or if they do train people There's a bit of a bias because I'll train just bodybuilders or high, you know performing athletes Volume definitely contributes to hypertrophy, but it's got to be the right volume. What does that mean? Well, it's very different from person to person. So that 15 to 20 sets per week That's true for a lot of people. It's not true for everybody for a lot of people That's too much volume and the context that you have to look at is your lifestyle The stress that you have your diet your sleep and of course your genetics all play a role and also Let's say you did follow a program that let's say was at 18 sets per week per body part And you were doing great and you did that for years Sometimes dropping volume gets you better gains when you're stuck to something for so long And the same as couldn't be true in the opposite where you maybe do low volume and then increase the volume Intensity and frequency and all that stuff these all play a role and also don't forget with maps and a ball like this trigger sessions So trigger sessions are a way to add lots of extra volume You could do up to three of those a day on your off days So, you know, essentially what I'm saying is this there's a lot of individual variants You're gonna have to play with things a little a little while, but I'm gonna be quite honest with you the vast majority of people that I've worked with 15 sets is around the top Per week per body part what most people can can take the people that handle more than that tend to be more advanced with better athletic or muscle building Genetics most people are anywhere between 9 to 12 sets in my experience and again the context being a normal life And maybe some stress and not everything else being totally perfect But the other part I want to focus on is the body dysmorphia side. That's gonna make it being objective really hard I know you're worried about gaining lots of body fat That's gonna make it real hard for you to move in the bulk, you know, like to gain weight because You're going to gain a little bit of body fat when you're gaining some muscle You're not to gain a lot, but you're gonna gain a little bit of body fat So the two options I would have for you are if you're you know in your question You said here you're about 13% body fat you can either cut down to 10% and then go on a bulk we're going to bulk now and Tell yourself that you won't allow yourself to get above 15% Body fat or something like that and then measure strength and make that the you know that the main in the reason I like strength is because body dysmorphia doesn't doesn't really affect strength You either get stronger or you don't and you could look in the mirror and judge yourself all you want But if the weight's going up, then you know you're doing at least most things right So that's that's those are the two directions. I would say I would recommend you go So, you know, I have a few things to contribute to this one I actually do agree with Lane and Greg and show and field who you're talking about like as far as volume If you've listened to show long enough You've heard me talk about when I competed one of the single most important things that I tracked To make sure that I was progressing show over show was of volume and how I manipulated that so But there's a piece that's missing in this conversation that if also if you've been listening for a long time You've heard me say many times which is my goal is always to do the least amount of work to elicit the most amount of change So what I don't like about the messaging that Lane is saying and Greg and these guys is we're all assuming That everybody is at the same place like what Sal is alluding to and what I have found in my experience is most people Respond very well to less very few people are Consistently training day in day out months and months out year in year out. We're good diet. Good sleep, right? And so by me when I start these people off I actually want to do as little as possible to get them to start to see some sort of change that way I have lots of room to increase volume over time So when I first started to get ready for competing so I competed for two years consistently I got ready a year before that so three years of being very very focused on Building right and that first year my routine looked very similar to anabolic and it was a very slow process of just trying to build My metabolism up get stronger pack on some muscle and what's cool is if you're following maps Consecutively we wrote them in order with purpose right so it goes maps anabolic Maps performance maps aesthetic and then you would move to something like split You know for somebody who's more body body part focus like a competitor and all of those we scale volume in it for you So anabolic is designed to be the lesser volume program in comparison to performance Aesthetic and then split and then the pinnacle would be PED So yeah, you do want to add volume if you want to keep ice So what they're saying is not not true But the starting point is really important and finding that for a client is Important that you don't go right to the end if you try if I try to start When not my journey if I started in PED type of volume I might have seen great results for the first month or two because of how much volumes in it But then I would have nowhere to go and scale and I would even argue you would have over-trained I would have I would have and I mean to add to this Steven to look look Let's just think about this think this out for a second Okay, adding volume year after year is the way that you get your body to continue to change Okay, that obviously there's something there's a bit of a flaw there because What are you gonna do five in five years or ten years into training 85 sets per week per body part? It's not always that way. So you can get up to a certain volume You get back down on the volume increase the intensity change the exercise all of a sudden get Well, this is what it this is what it looked like for me. It went anabolic performance Aesthetic split PED for two shows back to anabolic Reset myself again, like it's and get what's awesome is after I train that long that consistently scale volume over time Man when I got back to anabolic and gave myself that adequate rest and brought the volume down I got really strong So, you know that that's the one thing I don't like about when guys, you know preach this message all the time It's like we're all assuming that you know the millions of people we're all talking to are in the exact same place And again, I'll always hammer this home The goal is to do as little as possible to elicit the most amount of change So I have more tools in my tool belt or toolbox to manipulate later on and yes Adding volume and manipulating volume is one of the single most important things To adding and building size over time But where you start is so important and then the last the last thing I want to say Is related to the comment about anabolic 100 percent the reason why you didn't see much from that Is because you're in a maintenance to a deficit on a program where it's about building your metabolism and building strength Running in a maintenance or or in a deficit. You gotta feed the body. Yeah Is is I mean the fact that you just maintained would be a success. So by running that in a bulk Um or at least maintenance surplus is going to be where you want to be in order to see some strength gains in muscle Muscle building. Did you do the trigger sessions religiously? I did. Yeah, three a day. Yeah And sorry, you did three a day on your off days No, I did one a day typically do three a day Huge difference huge difference if you do three a day versus one a day and make sure you're just you're just trying to get a pump That's all you're trying to do Gotcha the other um kind of question I had with regards to that is that just seems to be kind of conflicting with The you know when you want to get better at a lift do it more frequently Um advice that you guys often give that's right So I'm wondering how you would incorporate the more frequency into like random lifts like the All right, so either pull-ups or bench press like just do a couple sets at like 70 for like half as many reps as you can do Yeah, I think on the trigger session days Think of it this way think of it this way, right? So if you have you have volume and frequency and intensity Okay, so the more you train the more often you train the longer you train the less you can train intensely So if you want to practice a lift every single day You're you're going to maybe have one day where it's decent intensity the rest of the time. It's it's literally Yeah, but don't forget sal this this if again going back to what I said Right now I mean I'm sticking to the goal is to build and put muscle and size and strength on right now Um, you know getting good at a lift. Okay. Yes that that matters But we're talking about the vault the conversation right now is about volume and properly scaling that And right now I want to follow maps anabolic to a t because in performance You're going to get more volume and practice and an aesthetic you're going to get even more volume and practice And so I think the message for me is that or for you for me is that Follow it to a t Follow up the right program right after it let the let us do the programming for you Where we scale the volume in and trust the process and do it in a maintenance to bulk so you can actually build While you do it Sounds good. All right. Thank you guys. Thanks for calling appreciate it. Thanks, David. All right. Take care You know, I want to say this about studies because you're gonna you can pull up lots of studies on exercise Like how what's the best rip range? What are the best set? You know range total volume and intensity And there's a couple things that you want to consider when you look at studies one is that studies are typically 12 to 16 weeks long so Whatever works best in a 12 to 16 week period doesn't necessarily mean that that's going to work best long term The body does tend to lose its I guess the the how it adapts or reacts to a stimulus Once it's used to that stimulus or changing things up Makes a big difference and then here's the other part that's really important If you read the studies and nobody ever does this Look at the participants. It's almost always 10 to 15 college aged males Okay, so let's let's think of the context here They're young men. So they have typically good testosterone levels. They're probably prime age to build recover They probably don't have a lot of stress. They're in college. They have enough time to obviously enroll in a study They don't have kids. They're not, you know, worried about all that stuff. So that context Matter so 15 to 20 sets for college aged males in a 12 week period That may be true for a majority of those people if you're a 35 year old or 45 year old male or you're a guy with lots of stress or You know, you're a woman or whatever like it changes things quite a bit And like I said, if I took all the clients that I trained and I considered all of them Uh 15 to 20 sets is too much for most people per way It's usually about 9 to 12 is what I would get out of consistent clients to be optimal Hey, if you enjoyed that clip, you can find the full episode here or you can find other clips over here And be sure to subscribe