"Listen to your body" is the type of advice that sounds good until you sit down and unpack it and realise that it's actually pretty shit.

The tacit assumption baked into that phrase is that your body knows what's best for you, when in reality, what it wants has been quietly shaped by years of unconscious habits.

Do you think your body wants to go to the gym and train hard, or would it prefer you stay horizontal on the couch while binge watching another shitty show that you'll forget about in a month?

Do you think your body wants to eat healthy, or does it want you to deepthroat every high-calorie food item in the snack aisle?

Your body wants comfort, and our modern environment is more than happy to oblige, serving up easy access to high-calorie foods and every opportunity to be as sedentary as possible.

Here's an example I'm sure you've experienced:

You feel exhausted. You’re convinced your workout’s going to suck.
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But you drag yourself to the gym anyway, only to hit a PR and leave feeling like a goddamn wizard. What kind of black magic fuckery is this? You might even wonder.

And then there are days you feel amazing, only to have a workout so bad it makes you question your entire existence.
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In both cases, your feelings weren’t a reliable indicator of your performance.
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Another example:
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You come home after a long, stressful day, and your feelings are like:
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​“Hey broski, there’s a tub of ice cream in the freezer with our name on it.”​
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And then you’re like:
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​“But you’re just a feeling. You don’t even have a name.”​
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And then you spiral into an existential crisis about whether the feeling *is* you, or just pretending to be you—and before you know it, you’re five tubs deep, crying on the couch, wondering when you became this dairy-fueled monster (five tubs ago, probably).
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In this instance, the feeling of stress is real, but was drowning your taste buds in frozen dairy goodness the best decision? Probably not, you fucking monster.
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​The point isn’t to ignore how you’re feeling but to question it and sit with it instead of immediately acting on it.​
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If you’re in a fat loss phase and you’re feeling some hunger, are you actually hungry, or are you just bored? And if you are hungry––have you tried sitting with the feeling instead of running to the fridge to shove food in your mouth? Or, maybe try accepting the fact you're in a deficit, and some hunger is inevitable.
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If you slept poorly for one night - does this automatically mean your workout is going to suck or is that just an expectation because every fitness person won’t shut the fuck up about the importance of sleep?

Here’s the other issue with being beholden to your feelings – more often than not, the things that make you feel shitty in the moment, like waking up early to go workout, actually make you feel better long term, and the things that make you feel good in the moment make you feel shitty long term.

So, I dunno, maybe, just maybe, fuck your feelings until you've learned to distinguish between an actual need and an impulse created by the comfort-seeking, dopamine-chasing meatsack you're living in.

How much volume should you do per workout?

In a previous Vitamin, I discussed a study that looked at the relationship between training volume (i.e. sets per muscle group per week) and muscle growth. The conclusion was that as weekly training volume increased, muscle growth also increased.

However, there was a point of diminishing returns. The researchers categorised weekly set volumes into different 'efficiency tiers', which you can see in the table below.

The minimum amount of volume needed to stimulate muscle growth was around 4 fractional weekly sets per muscle group (more on what a fractional set is below).

The next tier (“higher efficiency”) shows that adding roughly 6 extra sets (bringing the total to 5-10 sets per week) leads to further growth.

As you move through the tiers, more sets are generally associated with more muscle growth, but the returns begin to taper off—the higher the volume, the less muscle gained relative to the extra volume being performed.

A recent study revisited the volume topic, but instead of volume per week, it focused on how volume per workout influences muscle growth and at what point it diminishes. [1]

The researchers classified sets as:

• Direct sets: The exercise primarily targets the muscle
  • e.g. bicep curls = 1 direct set for biceps
• Total sets: Any muscle involved in the exercise is counted
  • e.g. lat pulldown = 1 set for back + 1 set for biceps
• Fractional sets: Muscles that aren’t the prime movers count as half a set.
  • e.g. Lat pulldown = 1 set for back, 0.5 sets for biceps

The "fractional" approach provided the most accurate estimate of how session volume affects muscle growth.

From here, the researchers identified the point of undetectable outcome superiority (PUOS), which was the point where adding more sets led to marginal or undetectable improvements in muscle growth.

If you look at the image below, you can see that:

• Muscle growth increases sharply up to about 6-8 fractional sets per session.
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• After about 11 sets per session, the gains flatten, and you're doing more work for very little return (i.e. ~11 fractional sets was the point of undetectable outcome superiority).

Before getting to the takeaways, it's worth highlighting a few limitations.

• Most studies only trained one muscle group. Therefore, the results of this study may not necessarily apply to real-world programming, where individuals train multiple muscles during a workout.
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• Few studies used very high set volumes. Most hypertrophy studies averaged ~6 sets per session. Only a few tested 10+ sets per session, so that ~11 set value isn't a hard cutoff.
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• Most studies didn't clearly track proximity to failure. We know training closer to failure results in more growth. However, many studies in this analysis didn't specify how hard participants trained, which limits how confidently we can say that more sets = more growth.
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• The fractional set counting method isn't bulletproof. The researchers readily noted that counting indirect sets as 50% of a direct set might overestimate muscle involvement.

Real-world takeaways

• Start with 3–6 sets per muscle, per workout.
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• Only add more sets depending on your recovery, time, and preference. Remember, just because 10 sets lead to more growth in a study, that doesn't mean you need to do that much.
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• Focus on training hard first, where you're taking each set close to failure rather than just randomly doing high-volume workouts.
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• Spread your volume across multiple sessions per week to maintain performance and recovery, rather than trying to cram all your volume into fewer workouts.
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• Use a combination of multi-joint (e.g. a squat pattern) and single-joint (e.g. leg extension) exercises to ensure you're targeting the muscle through a range of angles for complete growth.

In practice:

• Pick 1–2 exercises per muscle, and do 2–4 sets per exercise.
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• Train that muscle 2–3x/week, and you’re golden (whatever the fuck that means).

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