Mesocycle Progression in
Hypertrophy: Volume
Versus Intensity
Mike Israetel, PhD,1 Jared Feather, MS,1 Tiago V. Faleiro,1 and Carl-Etienne Juneau, PhD2
1
Renaissance Periodization; and 2Dr. Muscle App
ABSTRACT
Week to week progressions over the
course of typically 4–8 weeks (before
a recovery week is taken) are one of the
central forms of progression in a muscle
growth training plan. Should the trainee
add more weight to the bar each week,
add repetitions to the sets, or add whole
sets to provide the best hypertrophy-
specific overload? Based on the current
literature, the likely answer is “some of all
3,” but with a progression in set numbers
probably being the most well supported.
The trade-offs between repetition and
weight progression are not as clear and
are discussed.
INTRODUCTION
o date, there has been a consid-
T erable amount of research on
the relationship between the
intensity of a program, its volume, and
the degree to which it causes muscle
growth. And although such research
has helped greatly to answer questions
of general strategies in training, some
specifics have yet to be well-studied.
One of these quite important specifics
is the question of progression in
a hypertrophy plan. How does one
manipulate training variables from
week to week in a plan designed to
grow muscle as its number one prior-
ity? Traditionally, the default progres-
sion has simply been to increase the
load being lifted, in both formal studies
Address correspondence to Dr. Mike Israetel,
misraetel@gmail.com
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and in much field practice (5,25). But
this practice occurs in part because it
was simply inherited from strength
training (as opposed to purposeful
hypertrophy training). In this article,
we explore the landscape of progres-
sion in a hypertrophy mesocycle,
attempt to make recommendations
for training, and propose hypotheses
to be tested in future research.
There are 2 primary variables that can
be increased in a hypertrophy training
program: volume and intensity. Inten-
sity can refer to relative intensity (the
percentage of 1 repetition maximum
[1RM] lifted or the proximity of the
set to concentric failure) or absolute
intensity (load). For clarity, we will
refer to absolute intensity as “load”
throughout this article (23).
In a program, increases that occur
within a 4- to 12-week period where
training is made more difficult over
time before a recovery phase is imple-
mented constitute a “mesocycle”
(18,21). For brevity, we are not address-
ing the potential intentional manipula-
tion of repetitions in reserve, which has
also been shown to play a causative
role in hypertrophy (8). For this reason,
going forward, all our comparisons will
assume the same repetitions in reserve
between progression approaches.
INCREASING INTENSITY, VOLUME,
OR BOTH?
Should we be increasing intensity
through a mesocycle, volume, or some
combination of both (and then, what
combination)? An important constraint
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that will guide all our comparisons
going forward is that the total amount
of fatigue that an individual can take on
without a decrease in performance is
finite (12,14). Put another way, there is
only so much workload that can be
added to a program until further over-
load becomes impossible, as the ability
to execute the program (performance)
is critical to the application of overload.
The amount of volume at which con-
sistent recovery of performance be-
comes impossible has been proposed
to be termed the maximal recoverable
volume (MRV) (13). For example, we
cannot say “let us add 2 working sets
per week to a program” and “let us add
5lbs on the bar per week” without
admitting that both come at some
trade-off of one another. If an individual
added no weight to the bar each week,
they could, for example, potentially add
3 working sets, and reach a certain level
of cumulative fatigue. If that same indi-
vidual added no sets to the program per
week, they could add perhaps 10 lbs to
the bar and reach the same cumulative
fatigue as if they added some of both
volume and intensity. Thus, the big
question of this paper is to what extent
our weekly progressions should come
from additions of volume, intensity, or
both. We have to answer this question
while keeping in mind that because
recovery ability is finite, we cannot have
KEY WORDS:
mesocycle; hypertrophy; progression;
overload; training; MRV; recovery;
volume; intensity
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 Progression in Hypertrophy: Volume vs. Intensity
it all, just some compromise between
the two.
Unfortunately, direct research answer-
ing this question has not yet been per-
formed. In separate studies, both pure
intensity progressions and pure vol-
ume progressions (11) have yielded
substantial muscle growth, but to the
best of our knowledge, no study has yet
compared the 2 progressions directly.
To guide our hypothesizing, we have to
ask the question of “over an average
mesocycle of program length, what
contributes more to hypertrophy; vol-
ume, or intensity?” On this matter,
there is a growing body of evidence
suggesting that there is a dose–
response of volume and hypertrophy
and, such a relationship has not been
shown for relative intensity, while the
effects of load are not as clear (21,22).
In general, higher volumes (to a point
of inability to recover from them, i.e.,
MRV) result in more hypertrophy. In
untrained subjects, more working sets
per muscle per week result in greater
hypertrophy from the 0–5 set range up
to the 10+ set range, and for trained
subjects, even higher volumes have
been shown to continue the relation-
ship of “more volume is better” for
muscle growth (21). In fact, more
high-volume training studies have been
published recently, and some (11,16,17)
—but not all (1,2,10)—suggest that the
upper limit of this dose–response
relationship may, at least in certain
circumstances, be higher than pre-
viously assumed. When taking into
account session frequency, hypertro-
phy increases are very reliably
observed as sessions climb from 1 to 3
working sets in volume to upward of
around 10 working sets in volume;
however, volumes much higher than
10 sets per session may be excessive
and thus cause suboptimal gains in
muscle mass (2). In summary, there is
substantial and growing evidence that
higher volumes are likely causative of
increased muscle growth.
On the other hand, the data on “more
relative intensity” being causative of
more muscle growth are not nearly as
2 VOLUME 00 | NUMBER 00 | DECEMBER 2019
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conclusive. In fact, to the extent that it is
conclusive at all, it suggests that, in a large
range of intensities, higher relative inten-
sities (percent 1RM) do not reliably lead
to more hypertrophy. It has been shown
that intensities shy of 30% 1RM poten-
tially do not cause the same degree of
hypertrophy as higher ones (22). It has
also been shown than the fatigue gener-
ated by multiple set programs with inten-
sities higher than 90% 1RM is prohibitive
to accumulating the volumes needed to
cause best hypertrophy outcomes (7).
However, within that range of roughly
30% 1RM to 90% 1RM, it is by no means
clear that higher relative intensities cause
greater degrees of muscle mass accretion
(21,22). That being said, some research
shows that higher relative intensities
may be beneficial (6). In fact, the number
of sets in a program sometimes seems
better correlated with its muscle growth
effects than its mathematical volume
(sets 3 repetitions 3 weight), which is
a roundabout evidence in favor of an
intensity-driven hypertrophy effect (3).
In other words, programs with less
mathematical volume (e.g., 10 sets of 6
repetitions) cause about as much growth
as programs with much more mathe-
matical volume (e.g., 10 sets of 20 repe-
titions), which illustrates a potential
intensity-mediated growth mechanism.
It is important to remember that what
is being discussed here is average volume
and intensity through the duration of
a whole program, not the progression
of it through the program. Nonetheless,
some tentative implications from this
body of research can be instructive.
TENTATIVE SUMMARY OF THE
EVIDENCE
Given the state of the aforementioned
evidence on volume versus intensity
effects on the degree to which a pro-
gram causes hypertrophy, we can ten-
tatively conclude the following points:
 The reasoning for the benefits of
added volume on hypertrophy is rea-
sonably sound.
 There is potential reasoning for the
benefits of added load, but it is not as
clear as the reasoning for volume
additions.
 To that end, increasing the number
of working sets in a program seems
like a potentially effective strategy
for increasing hypertrophic effects.
 Because of the finite nature of fatigue
accumulation, it stands to reason
that any intraset progressions
(increasing weight or repetitions
per set) must be weighed against
an expense of a progression in sets.
 Because rising relative intensities are
likely to add disproportionate fatigue
but no added per-set hypertrophy
benefit, they can be tentatively ruled
out as a mode of progression for
hypertrophy. In other words, pro-
grams that drop repetitions from
week to week as weights used go
up rapidly (sets of 10 one week, 8
the next, 6 the next, and so on) are
likely suboptimal for inducing mus-
cle growth.
 Adding weight on the bar while
keeping repetitions the same or add-
ing repetitions to each set but keep-
ing load the same both appear to be
viable strategies in progressing over
the mesocycle within each set, and it
is not yet clear which of these, or if
either of these, is superior to
the other.
Because volume, especially counted in
the number of sets, seems so determi-
native of hypertrophy, we tentatively
recommend that it be a central vari-
able of progression in a mesocycle de-
signed to optimize muscle growth.
We cannot confidently proclaim that
volume should be the only variable of
progression, but we can be skeptical
of any program that progresses only
in relative intensity to attempt to
maximize hypertrophy, as this vari-
able has been largely shown not to
matter for hypertrophy within a very
wide range (20). On the other hand,
volume has been shown to have a pos-
itive dose–response relationship to
hypertrophy within a wide range (21).
Given the state of the evidence, it
seems as though the default assump-
tion should be one in which volume
predominates a progression, and rel-
ative intensity is, at the very most,
a secondary concern.
 Figure 1. Set progression over the mesocycle. Perhaps by increasing sets from week to week during a mesocycle, hypertrophy
stimulus can continue to be optimized as adaption to training occurs.
Does this mean that a hypertrophy-
specific program should not progress
intensity at all? Not necessarily. It has
been shown that a diversity of relative
intensities within a single program may
result in more muscle growth than a sin-
gle range (4). If we rarely increase load,
eventually all of the sets in a program will
be in a very high repetition range (20+).
This would eliminate the aforemen-
tioned relative intensity diversity and
thus lead to suboptimal results. With
some research showing a possible
fiber-type-specific effect of various rela-
tive intensities (with faster-twitch fibers
potentially benefiting from heavier loads
and slower-twitch from lighter ones), the
conservation of intensities within certain
1RM ranges/zones seems prudent
(6,9,24). In addition, increasing load
without decreasing repetitions (and rela-
tive intensity) not only boosts intensity,
but also boosts mathematical volume,
which can further benefit growth. A ten-
tatively sound approach may be to
increase intensity only insofar as it pre-
vents repetitions from creeping upward
in a program (increasing the load but not
the relative intensity). For example, if you
start with sets of 5, 10, and 20 repetitions
in various exercises in a hypertrophy
program, weight on the bar should be
raised incrementally in such a way as to
make sure that, at the end of the pro-
gram, the weight you are using for “sets
of 5” is heavy enough to still only get
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you around 5 repetitions per set, as
opposed to never increasing the weight
and eventually seeing your “sets of 5”
turning into sets of 8, your “sets of 10”
turning into sets of 15, and so on, thus
no longer providing you with the same
broad spectrum of 1RM ranges/zones
as when you began. Even if the research
on 1RM ranges/zones is not convinc-
ing, some intensity increases would
have to occur at some point, lest the
trainee is to eventually only train with
weights that were now predominantly
under 30% 1RM after gaining enough
strength over time. Is it possible that
increasing repetitions per set (over the
mesocycle) instead of increasing load
and keeping repetitions the same pro-
vides more growth? It is, but the evi-
dence on working sets being roughly
equivalent for hypertrophy makes this
possibility a bit less likely. If raising rep-
etitions worked better than raising
weight while keeping repetitions con-
stant, we could expect to see higher
repetition sets produce more growth
than lower repetition sets, but such is
not the case. Is there a chance that add-
ing repetitions versus adding weight
leads to less fatigue accumulation and
thus the ability to add more sets to the
“adding repetitions, not weight”
approach? Perhaps, but there is not
enough evidence for a confident asser-
tion such a likelihood. And because of
the above-noted potential benefits of
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increased load diversity, we cannot yet
say if adding repetitions or adding
weight (or which trade-off of one or
the other) is best.
PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS
What does this imply from a practical
perspective? In essence, we propose
that volume, especially when measured
by the number of working sets, is more
impactful on hypertrophy than relative
intensity, and that it is probably wise to
avoid any manipulation of relative
intensity that greatly reduces the ability
to increase working sets further. Load
may be a driver of hypertrophy, but
there are no data to show that it is
superior to volume, so any increase in
load that greatly reduces a lifter’s ability
to increase working sets is likely also ill-
advised. On that point, it should be
noted that Mangine et al. (15) did find
that 4 sets of 3–5 repetitions lead to
greater increases in lean arm mass as
measured by DXA over 8 weeks than
4 sets of 10–12 repetitions, suggesting
that greater loads are more effective
than greater volume (defined as sets 3
repetitions). But, Schoenfeld et al. (19)
found that lighter load training (sets of
8–12 repetitions) caused more growth
than the same number of sets of heavier
load training (sets of 2–4 repetitions),
which leaves the state of the evidence
between these 2 studies equivocal. As
we have noted above, evidence suggests
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 Progression in Hypertrophy: Volume vs. Intensity
the number of working sets is a better
measure of volume than sets 3 repeti-
tions (3), and based on that definition of
volume, volume was similar between
groups in the Mangine et al. (15) study.
In an applied setting, a hypertrophy
program might be one in which
a trainee begins the mesocycle with
a volume of training they can easily
recover from, but one that still causes
some degree of muscle growth. Over
the weeks of training, the volume
should probably be increased slowly,
perhaps by adding the number of
working sets performed per week, per
muscle group. Eventually, the individ-
ual will reach a volume level from
which recovery is no longer possible
(MRV), and performance will drop,
signaling the need for a reduction in
volume back to very low levels, per-
haps for a week or so, to allow for
the drop in cumulative fatigue and a re-
starting of the volume addition pro-
cess. On the intensity front, the
trainee may benefit from picking sev-
eral relative intensity zones as men-
tioned, perhaps a “heavy” (5–10
repetitions per set) zone, a “moderate”
zone (10–20 repetitions per set), and
a “light” zone (20–30 repetitions per
set) and increasing weight in each zone
either weekly or less frequently to keep
the repetitions from inching upward
and out of their respective zones. It
remains unclear at this time whether
or not such increases in intensity are
best performed every microcycle
(week of training), every several micro-
cycles, or even just once a mesocycle
(thus letting repetitions go up consid-
erably over each mesocycle and reset-
ting them back down after).
For example, based on the above,
a trainee might begin his mesocycle
at 10 sets per muscle group per week
and raise it by an average of 2 sets per
muscle group per week to get to 20
sets before deloading to reduce fatigue
(Figure 1). During this time, that
trainee might also be increasing weight
on the bar by 2.5 lbs or so each week to
4 VOLUME 00 | NUMBER 00 | DECEMBER 2019
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prevent repetitions from drifting too far
Tiago V.
above respective zones.
Faleiro is
a consultant for
CONCLUSION
Renaissance
To conclude, we hypothesize that over
Periodization.
a mesocycle of training for hypertro-
phy, increasing volume is more impor-
tant than increasing relative intensity.
As the effect of increasing absolute
intensity (load) is not as clear, for
future research, one suggestion would
be to compare pure load progression
Carl-Etienne
to pure volume (working sets or repe-
Juneau is the
titions per set) progression. Another
founder of the AI
suggestion would be to look for
trainer Dr.
genetic factors, perhaps associated
Muscle.
with muscle damage and recovery,
which may cause some individuals to
respond better to a progression in vol-
ume, whereas others may respond bet-
ter to a progression in load. Until
conclusions can be drawn from such
research, we propose that a sensible
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