As far as the research goes, hypertrophy tends to max out around 80-85% of 1RM and how many reps you can do on that varies according to the individual and that individual’s lifts/muscle groups.
James Krieger recently posted an addendum to his "volume bible" in the membership portal of his page, based on unpublished data from Schoenfeld. Here are some screenshots:
My thoughts, as per my recent facebook post:
A brief synopsis of my current views on the current and soon-to-be-published studies on training volume:
- they are running statistical sorcery on a pretty huge variation in rate of gains to tease out a few % advantage to the higher volume. Using %ages it sounds like you get twice the gains (5% vs 10%), but with several caveats (are you actually measuring muscle growth with any reliable accuracy?). You are essentially doing 3-5x the volume for a pretty small benefit (5%). Would you invest your money the same way?
- there will be more inflammation with higher volumes to skew the results when measured by the most common methods, and even then it is difficult to measure the pretty miniscule changes over the 8-12 weeks most studies run for.
- no individual subject gets to compare different volumes, they will simply be a number in the group average without ever knowing if a lower (or higher) volume would work better for them.
- a higher rate of gains over the 8-12 weeks that most studies run for, doesn’t necessarily translate into the same rate of gains over 6 months or 12 months.
In fact, my experience shows that a higher initial rate of gains tends to taper off compared to a more moderate rate of gains. We even have studies showing that a group training 6 weeks on, 3 weeks off (!) achieved the same muscle growth over 6 months as a group training consistently - the rate of gains was higher after the 3 week rest period in the first group and they caught up with the other group.
Here’s a former client and his experience with the more conservative volume approach (basically 2-3 sets (or 1 rest-pause/Myo-reps set) 2-3x/week):