How Many Exercises Should You Do Per Muscle To MAXIMIZE Growth?

hey folks it's doctor mike from renaissance position as always and today's color is purple would you look at that brilliant let's get into actually learning things instead of suffering through my painful dad jokes how about that great how many exercises do you have to do per muscle group per session in order to get the best response and there's such a thing as too few especially for today's topic is there such a thing as too many so for example if you're going in and you want to train your chest how many exercises do you need to

do in that one session let's say you may train chest and then biceps and the triceps that day for just chest how many exercises do you need now a lot of the times the answer from many of the ways pro-bodybuilders have trained in the past and of course that trickles down through the rest of fitness oftentimes the answer for many people is well you know four or five exercises for a muscle is generally a good thing you'll have probably memory of this in your own head having visually experienced it yourself hopefully not from your own

perspective you're just watching other people do it i'm sure as hell done this myself you the ultimate college freshman year of college chest workout you do say it with me now flat barbell bench incline barbell bench that's two so far decline of course how do you hit the lower fibers if not a decline then you want to get some outer pec uh outer lower pec you do some dips and of course you end up with a drop set of cable flies at the end if not even doing two different kinds of flies because yeah the

cable hits you well but what about the pack deck different stimulus we're up to six exercises chest fully developed is that necessary well let's take a look and see what science has to say here's the deal the research is getting clearer and clearer about this every few months when a new study is added into the total publication list of how many sets per session per muscle are optimal and it seems like anywhere between three at the low end and 12 at the high end of sets per muscle per session like sets of chest on monday

between 3 and 12 total sets for chest not per exercise seems to be right where most people get their best muscle growth much more than 12 sets is probably overkill it's too many you're so weak by then you're barely stimulating shit it's actually called junk volume anything fewer than three sets is like well if you did more sets you could have gotten more growth pretty open and shut so that all of a sudden if we understand let's say make a simple number out of this 10 sets at most is what an average will be doing

10 sets all of a sudden if you're doing six exercises that's like one to two work sets per exercise or it sounds kind of curious as to why you wouldn't just do fewer exercises and get more time spending uh high quality work on each separate exercise we'll get to that in a second there's another concern here it's that we could say okay we could do a lot of exercises per muscle precession if there was a really big benefit if the muscles were architecturally very complicated had very distinct and numerous sub-regions we have to at this

part then we have to this part then this part this is known as the nipple area of the chest maybe that's an area you can hypertrophy with weights turns out that's not the case what is the case is that most exercises and sorry most muscle and muscle groups have between one and three main functional elements or angles that they can be targeted from that actually differentially cause meaningful hypertrophy so for example your pecs have charitably maybe three different angles of attack there's the sternal pectoral which is the main part of your pecs your lower pecs

and mid and most of your upper actually then there are the clavicular pecs which is the upper pecs so maybe you do some pressing movements that go normal for one maybe you do some incline pressing for the other and then lastly there may be some small benefit on occasion to including a fly that hits the fibers maybe closer in especially if you cross your hands or pause at the top at the end which if you don't do a bench you don't really get all that full contraction so potentially you have two kinds of compound pushing

incline and horizontal or two kinds of fly movements and then just one kind of fly on top of that so at most if you have three let's say monday you're doing chest and i see you're doing a flat pressing movement an incline pressing movement and a fly movement in any angle i would say anything more than that is almost by definition overkill so why are you doing that why would you do for example incline barbell and then incline dumbbell when it kind of hit the same part of the pecs unless you need more work the

question is how much more work well if you're doing a total of 10 sets and that's a lot for pecs 10 sets that's towards the end of a plan usually not at the beginning if you do five sets of incline barbell work maybe you'll do five sets of incline dumbbell work if you really just want to hammer the upper pecs maybe you just do five sets of flat pressing of some kind and then g wiz you're kind of out of volume and that's really all you need to do to hit the whole chest anyway it's

not like there's small components of the chest that require very specific exercises let's look at the most complex muscle group that's termed one group generally from a training perspective in the human body in bodybuilding or just fitness in general the back when people say i'm hitting back today you could intelligently surmise hold on a second that's a lot of stuff you know because if someone says to you like you know they're running over to the tv in a in a in some kind of lounge area at a school and you're like hey like come look

at the tv there's war in asia like on the way to writing tv you could be like fuck where in asia russia's in asia kazakhstan's in asia azerbaijan is in asia technically the entire middle east is in asia and also japan is in asia there's the southeast wait hold on a little bit more specific so the back is kind of like asia in this regard it is quite complicated and has a few different parts but not that many parts there are the lats you can do exercises to target the last specifically and again as soon

as you've chosen one to two exercises to target the lats any more than that is kind of overkill because there's only so many high quality sets you can do and then there are the erectors the spinal erectors they're the muscles of your back that allow to arch your back and keep it rigid against a heavy load okay that's another functional group we could have exercises that bias the erectors and then there's what people call the mid-back or the upper back which is composed of the rhomboids the teres major teras minor and the mid and lower

trap muscles uh upper traps usually aren't included in back but they get a lot of work anyway the those the rhomboids terra's major and the mid and lower traps they really all do something very similar which is anytime you're doing some rowing and you're having a peak contraction or a deep stretch those muscles are heavily involved so at the end of the day it's like vertical pulling and lat work horizontal pulling to hit the rhomboid stairs major lower traps those are one exercise each and then like a lot of times if you do especially like

a barbell movement or dumbbell movement not a chest supported movement for rows or if you even arch and retract and round over on your rows you can hit that erector check with just two exercises right so if you were saying well i need an exercise separately for rhomboids another one for mid lower traps then i got my lat focused movements then i've got my erector focus movements a lot of times one or two exercises will condense that into everything you need so yeah for the back you can see how three exercises for example we'll get

to some examples later you can see how three exercises make sense but as soon as you insert a fourth exercise notice we have lats erectors and then sort of upper back upper mid back as functional groups like if you have a fourth exercise it's just going to be doubling up on one of those or another and remind you there's tons of crossover anyway you say let's say you do lap prayers to hit your lats and then you do some rows to hit your erectors hold on a second yeah you did hit your erectors with those

rows but they also hit your lats again also and they hit the shit out of your mid-back so what exercise would you add to that well you could add another rolling movement you could have lat movement but after that third exercise gee we're double checking multiple boxes there's only so much work your back can take some point it's just overkill or superfluous lastly something super super uh or sorry second to last super straightforward what are the functions and the components of the quads like not charitably we could just say knee extension that's it if you

do squats and or leg presses and or hacks watts you've already checked the box with one exercise but maybe you could say okay okay fine there's that whole thing with you know the middle part upper part of the quad uh you know the rectus femoris is ostensibly maximally hypertrophied when the hip is not in flexion you know when the hip is mostly extended that muscle works better so maybe we could have some kind of leg extension or seated back like ascension to attack that that's understandable but that's really picking at really tiny tiny particles at

that point so the quads have one to two functions charitably two so how many quad exercises do you need to do as far as making sure the exercises are different not just as a way of getting more sets so we'll talk about that in a bit but as you get bored three four five sets of an exercise you can just switch exercises that have the same functional requirements still same knee extension component but they're just a different exercise slightly different angle mostly to counteract the boredom of having to do something and to keep the sfr

really high but outside of that gee whiz you know one quad exercise may be enough of a correct answer certainly two take care of everything with three it begs the question of well you're really doing 12 sets for quads and if you are i'd like to see your program because if you see any of our rp training videos where we train people really hard that are super jacked a lot of times one quad exercise is all the trick they need they do one and a half they do some leg presses and hacks and they do

half of an exercise worth two sets of squats and then they collapse and blood comes out of their eyes so you don't actually need a whole lot of quad work same with hamstrings hip extension and knee flexion although if you train knee flexion at an extended position something like a seated leg curl you really get both of those functions if you do the hip extension only like a stiff leg and deadlift 90 some percent of your hamstring grows a ton anyway so you don't actually have to do both of them in the same session and

obviously that means you know five to ten sets of hams covered by two exercises is absolutely mostly overkill but certainly enough for almost everyone to get some growth out of now here's the kicker i keep saying well you know you have incline work and flat work but you don't need to do both of them hold on why not because you don't need to do everything you need to do that week in one session right it's possible to go to a restaurant and have chicken and rice for lunch and then same restaurant and have some beef

and pasta for dinner you don't need to show up to that restaurant at lunch you'd be like i need chicken beef pasta and rice all mixed together they're gonna be like all right that's gonna be weird you're like shut up you don't know nutrition that's not how it works if there are some nutrients you get from the beef and the pasta later just over the day getting those nutrients means you don't have to get all of your nutrients all in one meal that's not how that works but some reason people seem to think that's the

case with training oftentimes they'll show up to the gym and be like i need to hit my chest from every single fucking angle brother and i'm like i got you brother if i can call you that though of course or iron compatriots that was a pretty good one so you say hey listen i get it but you have another chest day thursday right like yeah like why don't you do like some of the stuff today 10 sets worth maybe focus a lot on upper packs but just train your lower packs a little bit whereas on

thursday you can train a lot of lower packs and a little bit of upper pecs you hit both of them through the week you check all the boxes maybe one day you do only pressing movements the other day you do some fly movements to check those boxes you don't have to have the ultimate chest or back or leg workout every session but over the course of the week if you check the boxes on all of the functional components of the muscle the different functional components that you want to hit if you want to hit those

throughout the week then you don't have to do every exercise every day you can have a two day split monday thursday for chest and do half of the chest exercises you were going to one half the other that's two to three exercises per session for chest way more manageable way better from a variety of perspectives than doing five or six chest exercises every time and actually creating quite a bit of redundancy another thing is this probably benefits you from a chronic nagging injury perspective if you incline press heavy every single time you do your chest

you might start to develop some shoulder joint irritation from just going heavy and doing inclines all the time but if you have one day in which you go flat heavy incline light the other day you go incline light flat light and then you have a moderate fly the different angles over the course of the different days that you're stimulating this issue from make it likely that one particular part of the connective tissue won't get so irritated as to cause you problems so there's another benefit right there from not trying to do everything all in one

session now all taken together okay this implies that if you do one to three exercises per session per muscle for one to five sets each that should more than cover your bases for getting everything you need to get done in a single training session and if you intelligently arrange your training sessions through the week prioritizing one part of the muscle in one prioritizing the other part of the muscle in another you can get this covered no problem anything else will work but it requires needless moving beyond you know from one machine to another warming up

there are a couple of problems with that i'll get specific as to what the problems are there is a situation in which when you start on a certain machine up to about three to six sets worth anywhere from one to two two to three and three plus to six sets you actually improve in your technique in that exercise your mind muscle connection improves considerably such that the stimulus to fatigue ratio of that exercise can actually be really good and maybe even improve a little bit depending on how you conceive it relatively from set to set

to set you guys may have noticed this in your own training you do first set of hack squats and you're like all right big pr that was great result someone's like did you feel your quads like yeah but my knees kind of felt a little weird you do set number two you move your feet down you push them out a little bit because that one you kind of we're in the middle of the set you don't want to adjust you're like if i put my feet lower and out more i'd feel this better you do

that and your quads are pre-pumped anytime you have a pump and your quads are a little fatigued your mind muscle connection is going to improve because you can tell where the muscle is better where the tension is you do that second set and you're like bro that was everything i'm nice and warmed up my technique is better i'm putting my feet in the right position and pushing through the right parts i'm using the right muscles and everything is great man i could just keep doing these sets now they're super productive the amount of joint stress

i'm feeling is really low the amount of psychological effort i have to impart is lower because i'm really in the groove and the amount of uh you know stimulus that i'm getting from pumps my muscle connection etc is really starting to rack up because i'm just in the groove making this exercise count i just really haven't figured out uh i don't know it's like if you go to a japanese restaurant you have to learn do chopsticks for the first time in your life once you figure it out you're like oh shit here we go and

you can just keep going if you come back a month later you have to relearn the whole fucking process so similar thing happens with exercises every time every time i see someone do like two exercises or sorry two sets on an exercise and then switch to a different exercise i'm like you know that third set if you had just stayed and done it on that first exercise would have been maybe the best feeling set of all of them at the very least stimulus to fatigue wise you have to compare doing another set in that same

leg press let's say versus doing the following finishing that leg press exercise like a decent fucking human being unracking all of your weights that's fatigue that's time finding the next machine you're going to do ostensibly you do not train at a private gym where you have access to all the equipment and there's nobody around you train in a regular fucking gym like damn near the rest of us and you have to go and watch karen do leg extensions for five fucking hours while scrolling on her phone excuse me excuse me she pretends not to see

you you're like ma'am and she's like yes like um just how many sets do you have on that just like you do one of these i do this all the time just trying to figure things out kind of hand gestures and she'd be like um three and you're like okay could you just like not just go back into care and mode but there you go three sets maybe i can switch my exercises around where i can do hack squats now and wait for leg extensions but then maybe like bob over there looking like he's on

the machine he'll come in and piss away another 15 minutes of my time so if you were just because once you're already on a machine you kind of have cart blanches to like how long you stay on there people come and go and they say how many sets you have you can say whatever 2 four eighteen they're usually just like and they fuck off or they work in once you're on a machine you're golden like nobody's gonna kick you off there but if you come off of machines every two sets and look for other ones

you're gonna delay yourself now let's say you get that machine karen does her two sets rather quickly gets off the machine you got to do at least one set of leg extensions probably to warm up to get the feel at least to adjust the seat to where you need it and then after that you're going to do multiple sets the latter of which after two or three sets you're really going to get into the leg extension groove and then watch this you got to get off the machine to go do hack squats and you have

to repeat that whole awkward process of finding a groove or warming up finding your groove getting into the best kinds of set stimulus to fatigue wise and then as soon as you're having a great time it's like going i'll give you a really decent analogy here we go here we go hum analogy gods please feed me information directly through my chakra that's it here's the analogy it's not a bad one if you've ever been to like a bunch of parties with your friends or like a bar crawl or something there is an optimality of how

many locations you hit and the answer isn't as many as possible for almost the same kinds of reasons like let's say you get to a bar club after five minutes you're jiving with the music like i feel this shit then after a few minutes you ordered a drink because it takes some time for you to order a drink stand in line jostle with the bartender after a little bit you you and your friends find some seats you get comfy you start chatting people up chatting with each other everything's going great you're grooving you're fucking having

a great time the last fucking thing you want in this world is from one of your friends who's asshole no social abilities whatsoever or just anxious and he's like you guys want to go under the next bar like motherfucker no we just arranged this situation to be optimal for us having a fucking great ass time i love it here like when we're not feeling the flow anymore then we can leave like you know when you've seen enough the same people and you're like this bar is kind of weird and this drinks fine but it's too

expensive let's go to the next one there has to be a good reason for you to go to the next bar now if you're in a dedicated pub crawl where there's a schedule great but here we're taking a sort of auto-regulatory approach we're going our job is to have as much fun as possible how do we cycle through going from bar to club to after party to the hotel lobby and after the lobbyists the scott what's the line hotel lobby and then we go up to our rooms and somebody i only listen to the edited

versions because i have virgin ears i don't want to hear demonic things so in any case the correct answer isn't like we like can you imagine telling someone like hey man i had an amazing night last night i went to 18 bars in two hours i'm sorry what so you basically walked around tokyo like well yeah like i had one drink total because as soon as we get in the bar we have 30 seconds we're gonna go to the next one that's dumb but that's how some people deal and treat with their uh exercises they

want everything at the same time incline decline flat flies dips like jesus when do you actually work out versus walking from machine to machine and warming up so just the same way as if you want a fun night out when you get to a place and the getting is good the groove is there everyone's having fun don't fucking leave unless there's a compelling reason to be like all right this is enough let's go in an exercise that tends to happen with three four five or six sets into an exercise not one two or three sets

into an exercise so if people who switch exercises too often they're they're doing this all this momentum destruction and momentum rebuilding that just gets in the way at least for any perspective one of nuisance and the nuisance absolutely builds psychological fatigue and that's not something you want in your program so here are some examples of using not so many exercises to build a really great session for a particular muscle so for the back you do four sets of bent rows three sets of pull-ups and then three lap prayer sets your back is fucking toast you

say well my rhomboids weren't hitting enough that's later in the week you do machine rows that's it three exercises is nothing to add chest you do incline barbell press for four sets in this example and then you do four cable fly straight sets of just a regular game flying on an incline you've hit flying pressing upper pec lower pack you've hit it all you're fucking done that's like 10 sets of chest and if they're hard sets you're golden until you come back and hit them again later you know another time during the week or two

times during the week depending on how your frequency is programmed for biceps here's this is descending into fewer and fewer sad examples biceps you do the easy curl you do four sets heavy and then you keep the easy curl bar you take some weight off and you do two sets light you don't even have to change exercises you got six fucking ball of working sets amazing stimulus to fatigue ratio and six sets for biceps often times there's way enough trained biceps every other day or something those doing biceps for anywhere between four and eight sets

every other day is much better than doing biceps for 16 cents or something twice a week so that wins and we just had to use one exercise amazing and imagine how much stress and time this saves you if you just find the fucking easy curl bar your busy ass commercial gym and as soon as you got your fucking hands on it that's it that's all i need no fucking take this away from me people but i don't need to go to ten machines and work in and spend two hours trying to get you know three

sets accomplished lastly hamstrings and this is the one that almost for everyone is the same hamstring exercise is done right with a full range of motion emphasis on the eccentric and the stretch are so powerful that you may do something like you know you just have two sets of stiff-legged deadlifts and because you're doing them properly your hamstrings are destroyed and blown away and then later that week you do four sets of leg curls and that's it i often get asked in my own training videos that i post you know instagram and youtube and stuff

like dr micah you did you did four sets of leg curls and that's all you did for hamstrings like motherfucker come try these sets you do some maya upsets four sets of leg curls you don't walk for a day and a half afterwards your hamstrings are sore for three and a half days that's all you need i've seen people's hamstring routines as ifb pros and shit like that whether i could start out with stiff legged deaths four sets of ten i go to lying leg curls three sets of ten three sets of 15 seated three

sets of ten standing one leg leg curl and then i finish it up by tying off tying the whole area out with lunges or whatever like tying it all in like how the fuck is tying it all in mean first of all i think you just want a cool pump to take pictures of your ass after you're done but tbh if you had anything like a relative effort that's remotely close to failure in any of those sets and your technique was anything like fucking normal basic technique on let's say stiff like a deadlift after four

sets of ten of sniffling deadlifts you would have rhabdo you'd be vomiting blood out of your fucking mouth and then you would be done training hamstrings the rest of your life you gotta force that anyone that says versus outside of a huge training history where they're used to doing this anybody can do four sets of ten hard stiff-legged deadlifts properly is a bullshit artist they're fucking lying to you tiny exceptions okay two sets of ten would have been good enough but i know if i see one of those programs something is wrong with the execution

with the effort with the technique and when you see programs of bodybuilders that are like five exercises for all different parts of the muscle tons of volume like man is this what i need to do or oh man i just must need to take drugs to survive this both those answers wrong those people just aren't training hard enough or their technique is so bad that some they need most of that stuff or if they don't need it they're over doing it and they would be better off doing less i know it sounds crazy but if

you can do less and get more god damn that's actually the best possible thing so here's the deal to sum this all up in most cases for most people even those after the most advanced hypertrophy one to two good exercises per muscle group per session with two to four sessions per muscle per week okay hammer these exercises with multiple sets each you know one to two good exercises two to six working sets for each exercise depending on how much volume you tolerated over the course of the multiple weeks you get into a better and better

groove every single set when you lose that groove on set five or six you switch exercises and the groove is reestablished you get a nice fresh thing to do if you do this i promise you will not have to take grand tour of every machine in the gym every time that you go and train chester quads or biceps or whatever and you'll get amazing amazing results and one of the best parts is because you're only focused on a few exercises per week at a time every few months when you change exercises you have a plethora

of new exercises to choose from which begs the question of college you know freshman year college chess workout guy he's doing incline barbell incline flat incline barbell incline barbell flat barbell decline barbell some dumbbell presses why not and some flies and some dips in all in one week let's be charitable and say it's one week not work or not one workout sometimes it is all one workout if one of those becomes stale or becomes you know starts to hurt uh the person and they're not getting good enough groove or results where do they go there's

no more fucking exercises to choose from you're gonna be doing one arm chest flies with a bosu ball some stupid shit that has no stimulus and luckily no fatigue either unless you fall off the fucking bosu ball the good thing about using just a few exercises is that it'll really let you focus in on mind muscle connection it really lets you milk as much out of the exercise as needed it saves you a shitload of convenience for not having to switch exercises it does the checks the box of maximizing hypertrophy and lastly the bonus round

thing is it leaves you with so much more variation to tap into when stainless inevitably temporarily eats up your current exercises if you have six or seven good chest exercises you only per any one week and thus any one month use one sorry you use two to three of them and it only takes a few mesocycles to refresh each chest exercise it doesn't take einstein to realize that you can have an infinity refresh loop that because you only use two to three chest exercises at a time you have six or seven good chest exercises on

the docket they're the highest stimulus to fatigue ratio exercises that work best for your body what you can do is do two or three two or three two or three when you come back around to the next two or three the last time you do them maybe six to eight months ago they may as well be new exercises they're super fresh your body super loves them you don't accumulate any joint wear and tear at the end of the day you can get super jacked by limiting your variation and intelligently using it after you get super

jacked finally you recreate your eighth birthday party your eight-year-old birthday party you invite all the same people awkward you get cake there's a clown you put on a funny hat finally unlike your actually birthday party you feel at home in your own body you're super muscular and uh you can die happy see you next time unless you do that thing i just said and then enjoy