How Many Sets Per Body Part Are Needed For Muscle Size Over 50 Years Old?

How many sets per body part are needed for muscle size over 50 years old?

In today’s video we are going to try and establish how many sets we need to maximize muscle growth or size for a given body part or muscle group. Secondly we will take a look at what is the minimum amount we have to do in order just to maintain our current level of of muscle over 50 years old. Because we have the additional challenge of fighting off age related muscle loss.

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This can be helpful information because life gets busy and there are times when we just can’t train as much as we would like. Whether it be family obligations or a work project that has a tight deadline. With this information we can maintain our hard earned muscle size with the minimum amount of time spend until we have the opportunity to get back to our regular schedule and continue on our path to greater muscle growth.

The American College of Sports Medicine recommends 1 to 3 sets for each exercise per workout for beginners at 70 to 85% of their one rep max, training 2 to 3 times per week and 3 to 6 sets for more advanced lifters at 70 to 100% of their one rep max. 3 to 5 times a week making for a weekly set range for newer lifters of 2 to nine sets per week and more experienced lifters doing at least 9 and upwards of 18 to 20 sets.

One of the other things the American College of sports medicine suggests is that beginners work with a rep range of 8 to 12 reps and more advanced lifters who are focusing on muscle size use 1 to 12 reps with the emphasis being in the 6 to 12 rep range.

This is important because just using sets as a guideline is incomplete without taking into account reps and effort. In this case they define effort as percent of one rep max. I personally Prefer Reps in reserve. Which is how many reps more you could have done to reach failure, once you have finished a set. So if you did a set of ten reps, but felt you could have done 2 more before you hit failure than that would be 2 reps in reserve.

To try and figure out the minimum amount of sets we have to do, we’ll take a look at a study where they took a group of older men between the ages of 60 and 75. They also had a second group of younger men between the ages of 20 to 35 do this study to compare results.

They had these men do lower body training for 16 weeks. The exercises used were squats, leg press and leg extensions. 3 sets for each exercise 3 times a week at 75 to 80% of their one rep max which put them in the 8 to 12 rep range. And it is no surprise that after 16 weeks they all built muscle, because we can get fit and build muscle at any age.

After this they broke them into 3 groups. One group stopped training all together. The second group cut back to 1/3rd the volume which would have been 9 sets a week and the last group cut back to 1/9th the volume which would have been only 3 sets per week. No surprise the group that quit training altogether lost there gains in 8 weeks. It took 16 weeks for the group that dropped back to 1/9th of the training volume to lose there gains, but the group that cut back to 1/3rd the training volume still had the muscle they had build even after 32 weeks.

If you are training full body workouts 3 times a week and have to drop back to once a week you should still be able to maintain your muscle mass. The younger men that duplicated this study still had new muscle growth even after dropping down to 1/3rd the volume.

Now I choose a 2016 meta-analysis published in the journal of Sports sciences to help establish the upper end for training sets. There are limitations with the research. The two biggest ones for me is the lack of studies in this area on men our age and there are very few done on experienced lifters.

This meta analysis looked at 15 studies and concluded that the amount of sets 10 plus sets per muscle group.

Training at higher volumes for a long period of time could potentially lead to over training which is why I like to increase the number of sets in each training block until I hit a period of overreaching then back off the sets with a bit of a deload and work my way back up again. So don’t be afraid to experiment with rep ranges and number of sets in order to find out what work best for you.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3e30/9228d037f1638e5da05743fb7b17b4fda692.pdf

http://www.ageingmuscle.be/sites/ageingmuscle.be/files/Dose%20response%20relationship%20between%20weekly%20resistance%20training%20volume%20and%20increases.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19204579

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