Free Training Volume Calculator
Paste your program, or add screenshots or a spreadsheet. You get the weekly sets for each muscle group, and where they come from.
Tip: paste the program as text.
Your weekly sets: 10-15 sets per muscle group per week is optimal
Detailed muscles
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Sign Up FreeHow it counts
Every exercise has one main mover, the muscle it's chosen to train, and it gets 1 set for each set you do. Its supporters, the other muscles that do real work against the load, get half a set each. So 4 sets of bench press count as 4 for the mid/lower chest and 2 each for the upper chest, front delts and triceps.
Power lifts earn half credit: half a set for the main mover and a quarter of a set for each supporter. They're done explosively and stop well short of failure. In the rules that's the Ball slam, Kettlebell swing, Clean and Jump rows, and any other jump or throw.
Weekly sets are every set in one full cycle of the program divided by the weeks in it, so a four-week block with a deload is averaged over all four weeks. Warm-up sets are left out, and a one-arm or one-leg set counts once. An exercise the rules don't cover yet gets a call of its own, explained under "How we counted it".
The 10 muscle groups
Credit goes to 21 detailed muscles. The simplified table rolls them up into these 10 groups; forearms and adductors are counted in the detailed table only. A group takes the highest credit any of its muscles got from an exercise, never the sum, so an exercise counts as at most one set of a group per set you do.
- ChestUpper chest, Mid/lower chest
- ShouldersFront delts, Side delts, Rear delts
- BackLats, Mid back, Traps, Lower back
- TricepsTriceps
- BicepsBiceps
- CoreAbs, Obliques, Hip flexors
- GlutesGlute max, Abductors
- HamstringsHamstrings
- QuadsQuads
- CalvesCalves
How many weekly sets are worth doing is a separate question: how many sets per week for hypertrophy looks at where the returns diminish.