Training volume
calculator

What this actually counts

Most volume calculators give you a number per muscle and stop. Two things are missing from that, and both change the answer.

1. Sets are counted fractionally

A set of barbell rows is not zero chest work and it is not a full set of biceps work either. Here a movement scores 1.0 for the muscle it directly trains and 0.5 where that muscle acts as a synergist. Count that way and most people discover their biceps and front delts are already near target before a single curl or raise is programmed — which is exactly why adding direct arm work so often fails to add arm size.

2. Your week has a ceiling

You cannot schedule more work into a shift than the shift can hold. A session has a practical limit of about 25 working sets before quality falls off, and each set credits roughly 1.9 muscle-sets once fractional contributions are counted. Four sessions therefore carry on the order of 190 counted sets per week — no matter what the sum of your fourteen targets says.

When the targets add up to more than that ceiling, they get scaled down to fit. That is the honest answer. A calculator that returns the unscaled numbers is handing you a plan that will quietly under-deliver somewhere without telling you where.

3. Frequency has a floor

Hitting your weekly number in one session is not equivalent to splitting it across two. Every muscle you train gets a minimum of 2× per week, and the volume figure above is the weekly total, not a single session's work.

Where the numbers come from

Weekly volume targets and the frequency floor come from Pelland et al. (2025), The Resistance Training Dose Response: Meta-Regressions on Weekly Volume and Frequency, Sports Medicine — a meta-regression across 67 studies and 2,058 participants. It is the same source the full plan builder cites, and this page runs the identical engine rather than a simplified copy of it.