I Cut the Number of Sets I Do in Half: My 100-Day Low-Volume Training Experiment

For 100 days, I cut my workouts roughly in half. Instead of my usual three or four sets per exercise, I did just one or two, with almost every working set taken to failure.

I also did this while cutting. So the question wasn’t just whether shorter workouts could build muscle. It was whether I could lose fat, hold on to my size, and maintain my strength while doing dramatically less work.

After almost two decades of training, I thought I had a pretty good handle on how much volume I needed. This experiment changed my mind about some of that, especially when it comes to training in a calorie deficit.

What I Actually Changed

I’ve always been a fairly high-volume guy. Arnold, Ronnie Coleman, and Jay Cutler all trained with a lot of sets. The research generally pointed in the same direction. Doing three or four sets of every exercise seemed like a no-brainer.

But first, we need to define volume. Here, training volume means the number of hard working sets you perform for a muscle each week. Warm-up sets don’t count.

If you do three sets of chest presses on Monday and three sets of cable flies on Thursday, your weekly chest volume is six sets.

For roughly the last decade, a common science-based recommendation has been about 10 to 20 sets per muscle per week. For chest, that could look like this:

• 10 sets per week: Three sets of chest presses and three sets of cable flies on Monday, plus four sets of push-ups on Thursday.
• 20 sets per week: Four sets each of chest presses and cable flies on Monday, three sets each of push-ups and pec deck on Wednesday, and three sets each of incline presses and dumbbell flies on Friday.

That’s a lot of chest training. And remember, those are hard sets taken to failure or close to it, before adding warm-ups or training the rest of your body.

For this experiment, my chest training became much simpler:

• Monday: Two sets of incline presses and two sets of pec deck.
• Thursday: Two sets of machine chest presses.
• Total: Six hard sets per week.

Most of my muscles received about six sets per week. Some got four. A few received more: 10 sets for shoulders, nine for back, nine for glutes, and eight for quads.

Across muscle groups, I averaged about 6.5 sets per muscle per week. Compared with my previous approach, that was pretty freaking low.

Doesn’t the Science Say More Sets Build More Muscle?

Yes, generally. I don’t think we need to pretend otherwise to make a case for low-volume training.

A 2010 meta-analysis by James Krieger combined eight studies comparing different numbers of sets per exercise. Two or three sets produced approximately 40% greater hypertrophy-related effects than a single set. That doesn’t mean 40% more muscle on your body, but it did favor multiple sets.

Then a 2016 meta-analysis examined weekly sets per muscle and found a dose-response relationship: more volume generally meant more growth.

A much larger analysis of training volume, drawing on 35 hypertrophy studies, found that same overall relationship across a very wide range of weekly volumes, from around four sets to as many as 43.

So was everyone wrong about volume? Not really. Higher volume works. The more useful question is whether doing more sets is always worth it in your particular situation.

The practical limitations matter

One criticism of high-volume research is that some apparent muscle growth might actually be swelling from training, rather than new muscle tissue. That swelling is called edema.

There may be some truth to that concern, but I don’t think it explains away the whole literature. The overall effect appears across too many studies, and the researchers address this issue themselves.

My bigger concerns are practical:

• Most studies don’t apply extreme volume to the entire body. They often emphasize one or two muscle groups, such as the quads or arms, while other muscles receive normal training or no training. Successfully blasting your quads doesn’t establish that you can recover from blasting everything at once.
• Most participants aren’t cutting. These studies are generally conducted around maintenance calories. A calorie deficit gives you less energy and can reduce your recovery capacity, so applying the findings directly to a fat-loss phase is less straightforward.
• The studies are usually short. Many last six to 12 weeks. They don’t tell us whether higher volume keeps pulling ahead over a year or two, or whether lower-volume training eventually closes some of the gap as someone approaches their natural potential.
• More volume comes with diminishing returns. Doubling your sets doesn’t double your muscle growth. Each additional chunk of work tends to buy you a smaller additional benefit.

That last point is huge. The amount of training that maximizes short-term growth is not necessarily the amount that gives you the best return on your time, effort, and recovery.

My Low-Volume Training Plan

I wanted to test the strongest version of a low-volume approach I could put together, not just remove sets randomly.

For 14 weeks, I repeated this split:

1. Upper body
2. Lower body
3. Rest
4. Upper body
5. Lower body
6. Arms and delts
7. Rest

Each exercise had only one or two working sets, and almost every set went to failure. By “high intensity,” I mean a very high level of effort, not simply lifting the heaviest weight possible.

I also tracked the outcome in several ways:

• Progress photos under the same lighting.
• DEXA scans on day one, day 30, and day 100.
• Standardized chest and quad strength testing.
• Performance in my regular workouts.

This was still an experiment with one subject. Tracking more carefully makes the experience more useful, but it doesn’t turn it into a controlled trial.

The first few weeks felt almost too easy on paper

After years of doing 10 to 20 sets per muscle per week, I definitely had doubts. Finishing an exercise after one hard set felt strange. Was that really enough?

By around week three, though, I wasn’t noticing a loss of size. If anything, I looked harder and fuller, with more vascularity. Getting leaner probably explained much of that, but I was still surprised by how well my muscles maintained their fullness.

More importantly, my strength was holding up while my body weight steadily dropped. That was an encouraging sign that I was retaining muscle, even though strength alone can’t tell us exactly what’s happening to muscle mass.

What a lower-body workout looked like

Low volume didn’t mean doing nothing. One of my leg workouts included:

• Squats: two sets.
• Leg curls: two sets.
• Lunges: one set.
• Leg extensions: two sets.
• Hip abductions: one set.
• Calf raises: two sets.

That was still a hard workout. It just took about 45 minutes, or closer to 60 if I took my time.

And I loved it. That matters more than I used to give it credit for.

The “Focus Effect” of Doing Fewer Sets

By the midpoint, I started to wonder whether my old training volume had been draining me more than I realized.

I used to dread some of those long workouts, especially leg days while cutting. My focus would taper off around the middle. I’d check my phone, rest longer, or start socializing. A long session would become even longer.

With only one or two working sets per exercise, something changed. I started calling it the focus effect.

When you know you have only a couple of opportunities to get the job done, each one feels important. Before every set, I reminded myself to nail both my execution and my effort.

Instead of mentally pacing myself through several more sets, I could put everything into the set in front of me.

That doesn’t prove low volume is physiologically superior. But a program that helps you consistently deliver better effort may work better in practice than a theoretically optimal program you struggle to stay engaged with.

The Science Supporting Low-Volume Training

The research doesn’t only tell us that more sets can produce more growth. It also tells us that surprisingly little training can maintain muscle, and that low-volume programs can still build it.

Maintaining muscle takes less work than building it

In a study by Bickel and colleagues, participants first completed 16 weeks of higher-volume leg training.

The training involved three weekly sessions, with three sets each of squats, leg presses, and leg extensions. That added up to 27 weekly sets for the quads.

During the subsequent reduced-training phase, one condition dropped to just one set of each exercise once per week. That meant reducing weekly volume from 27 sets to three.

The striking finding was that such a large reduction could preserve gains over a 32-week maintenance period, with some participants continuing to improve. The study included 70 people overall, with responses depending on factors such as age and the reduced training dose.

The takeaway isn’t that three weekly sets will be perfect for everyone. It’s that you generally need much less volume to maintain existing muscle than to maximize new muscle growth.

Experienced lifters can grow on very little volume

A 2025 low-volume study followed 42 resistance-trained participants through eight weeks of training.

They performed two full-body workouts per week, with just one set per exercise. Each workout took about 30 minutes.

One group trained to failure. The other stopped with two repetitions in reserve. Both groups made significant gains, although the failure group tended to grow more overall.

That gives us two useful points:

• Even trained lifters can make progress with short, low-volume workouts.
• When you’re doing very few sets, taking those sets to failure may help you get more out of them.

Effort deserves more attention

A meta-analysis on proximity to failure also supported a relationship between training closer to failure and greater muscle growth.

If one variable deserves the crown, I think training hard has a pretty good claim.

Low volume makes that easier to apply. When you only have a small number of working sets, you can afford to push them very hard without accumulating the same overall workload.

Trying to combine very high volume with failure on every set is a different proposition. The fatigue and recovery demands can start outweighing the marginal benefits.

My Results After 100 Days

I finished about seven pounds lighter, visibly leaner, and very happy with how much size and fullness I retained. My legs and shoulders stood out to me in particular.

But photos only tell part of the story. Here’s what the measurements showed.

DEXA: fat loss with a relatively small lean-mass change

From day one to day 100, my DEXA results showed:

• Fat mass: Down 5.5 pounds.
• Lean mass: Down 1.8 pounds.

That’s a solid result for a cut, especially because DEXA lean mass is not the same thing as muscle mass. It includes water and other non-fat tissue. Losing some water as you get leaner can reduce the lean-mass reading without representing an equivalent loss of muscle.

The intermediate scan made the picture even more interesting. From day 30 to day 100, I lost another 2.3 pounds of fat while my measured lean mass increased by half a pound.

That half-pound increase could easily fall within measurement error. I’m not treating it as proof that I built muscle. But it was encouraging, and it certainly didn’t suggest that my low-volume training was causing a dramatic loss of size.

Strength: maintained pressing strength and stronger quads

On the standardized check-in days, I tested my Smith machine bench press and leg extension strength under a strict fasted protocol.

After 100 days:

• Smith machine bench press: I matched my starting strength.
• Leg extension: My maximum increased by 15 pounds.

I was also setting personal records in regular training, even in the final week when my food intake was lowest.

On the pendulum squat, I progressed from five reps with five plates to six reps the following week, then seven the week after that. My body weight was going down while my performance was going up.

In the final upper-body session, I also beat my previous chest press machine best by several reps.

For someone already very advanced, getting lighter while maintaining or improving performance on substantially less volume felt like a big win. The raw DEXA and strength-test data provide the full record.

The biggest surprise was how much I enjoyed training

At 34, with almost two decades of lifting behind me, workout enjoyment is becoming more important.

Instead of dreading long sessions, I genuinely looked forward to training. The workouts were shorter, more focused, and easier for me to recover from.

That isn’t a side benefit I want to brush off. A training approach you enjoy and consistently execute well has real practical value.

How This Changed My Recommendations

I used to say that your training volume didn’t need to change just because you moved from a calorie surplus into a deficit.

After this experiment, I’d update that advice.

When cutting: lower volume makes a lot of sense

My current view is that lower-volume, high-effort training is a very sensible approach during a cut.

You have less energy available for recovery, and maintaining muscle requires less volume than maximizing growth. High-volume training can still work, but I no longer think keeping all that volume is automatically the best choice.

The important condition is effort. My experiment wasn’t a test of casually doing fewer sets. It was a test of doing fewer sets while pushing them very hard.

This is still my interpretation of the research combined with one personal experiment, not proof that everyone should copy my exact set counts.

When bulking: consider specializing in one muscle at a time

For a lean bulk, I’m interested in keeping most muscles at relatively low volume while increasing volume substantially for one priority muscle.

That might mean 10 to 20 weekly sets, potentially even 30, for the muscle I’m emphasizing. Every few months, I could rotate the focus.

This lines up better with how much of the high-volume research is actually conducted: a lot of work for a limited number of muscles, rather than extreme volume for everything simultaneously.

I see this as a promising strategy, especially for advanced lifters, not something this experiment directly tested.

Fewer Sets Can Still Be Serious Training

The biggest lesson from these 100 days isn’t that volume doesn’t matter. It does.

It’s that more work isn’t automatically better once you account for your goals, recovery, time, and ability to bring genuine effort to every set.

I lost fat, held on to my physique, maintained or improved my strength, and enjoyed training more while doing far fewer sets. That’s enough for me to take low-volume training seriously, especially during a cut.

I built that approach into my Min-Max Program: a 12-week low-volume, high-intensity plan with exercise substitutions, coaching notes, more than 90 exercise demonstrations, and an ebook explaining the science. It’s designed for people who want shorter, focused workouts, whether they’re losing fat or exploring a more time-efficient way to build muscle. For complete beginners, I’d still suggest starting with my Fundamentals Program first.