Mesocycle Progression in Hypertrophy: Volume Versus Intensity
By Dr. Carl Juneau, PhD
 · 2 min read
Mesocycle Progression in Hypertrophy: Volume Versus Intensity
Contents

I co-authored a review titled Mesocycle Progression in Hypertrophy: Volume Versus Intensity with Mike Israetel (Israetel et al. 2019). It was published on Dec 11.

How should you progress in a mesocycle? From the abstract:

“Should the trainee add more 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.”

Keep in mind that this is week-to-week progression in a mesocycle (typically 4-8 weeks). Long-term, you should focus on adding weight to the bar.

Still, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on your weekly volume (best measured in number of hard sets per body part). It should be around 10-20 sets.

Mesocycle Progression in Hypertrophy: My Volume Week to Week

Here’s what my volume looks like for shoulders over the last 52 weeks:

Mesocycle Progression in Hypertrophy: Number of hard sets by week for shoulders in my dashboard over the last year
Number of hard sets by week for shoulders in my dashboard over the last year

As you can see:

– Volume went up and down week to week
– I did between 4 and 34 sets a week (but mostly 14-21 sets)
– My average went up from 15.2 to 15.5 sets over the course of the year

That’s smack within guidelines, and subjectively speaking, I’d say my shoulders have grown this year. Mind you, I’ve been working out for 19 years now, so they don’t grow as fast as they used to and any change is hard to spot.

If you’d like to analyse your own volume and you train with Dr. Muscle, I’ve got a Christmas gift for you. Head over to our new volume dashboard, courtesy of customer Ross Coundon. The dashboard is still early, so let me know if you notice any issues. And it’s open source, so if you’d like to contribute, get in touch.

Not using Dr. Muscle yet? It gets you in shape fast, like a personal trainer. But it’s 10 times cheaper, always up to date, evidence-based, available 24/7, and 59% faster. Plus, now it makes it easy to analyse your volume. To learn more, flex over to https://dr-muscle.com/discount.

Merry Christmas!

Carl