By: Chris Gates

To build muscle, you need to be strength training.

But how much strength training should you do? How heavy should you lift? How intense should it be?

How much is too much, and how little is too little?

I’m going to answer all of those questions for you in this article, with the goal of answering the primary question of the day: how much weight should you lift to build muscle?

Regardless of how you strength train, you need to be challenging yourself to build muscle. And often, that comes in the form of adding weight and intensity to your exercises and workouts.

Let’s first dive into some of the key principles for building muscle, and then we’ll talk more specifically about your exercises and how much weight you should lift to build muscle.

Key Principles to Building Muscle

If you search the mechanisms for building muscle, you’ll see a lot written about mechanical tension, muscle damage, and metabolic stress.

I want to go in a somewhat different direction here.

I could go on and on and bore you with the science of why lifting weights helps you to build muscle, but I don’t think we need to go there. You’re here because you know you need to lift weights, and you want to get specific advice on how much to lift, when to lift, why, and how to move forward in the best way possible to make progress.

The mechanisms for building muscle are all important. Don’t get me wrong. They explain why what you’re doing is working, or not working.

But I think we can simplify things in a way that still gives you a lot of background information, while providing clear steps you can take to move forward and make progress.

Here are the three key principles I want you to focus on for building muscle:

1. Training volume
2. Relative intensity
3. Form and technique

At the end of the day, to build muscle effectively you need to be challenging your body in ways that forces it to grow and adapt. When you lift, your body reacts to the stimulus from lifting weights. That reaction comes in the form of recovery and growth in order to better handle the same stimulus in the future.

Quite simply, your body wants to be as efficient as it possibly can be. So if you repeatedly do something that is very physically challenging, your body is going to do everything it can to make that physically challenging task easier.

In order to build muscle, you need to introduce stimuli in a way that is responsible, and effective for muscle growth. In short, you need to progressively challenge your body more and more over time.

Training Volume

So let’s start with training volume, because we know that volume is one of the pillars for muscle growth. Training volume is the total amount of sets, reps, and weight you lift in a given training session, and/or across an entire week.

The easiest way to quantify training volume is to focus on how many weekly sets you do for each muscle group. And we know that, generally speaking, somewhere between 10-20 hard sets per muscle group each week is going to be optimal for most people to build muscle.

Typically, that’s best accomplished via training each muscle group multiple times a week (2-3 times), where you’re doing a fraction of those weekly sets in each training session.

For example, you might train chest three times a week, for a total of 15 sets, in the following order:

Day:	Volume:
Monday	5 sets
Wednesday	5 sets
Saturday	5 sets

Finding a way to accumulate adequate training volume is important, and within those weekly sets you need to also quantify the level of effort you’re putting forth.

Relative Intensity

Within the 10-20 hard sets, you should be focused on training legitimately hard. That’s why the guidelines say “hard sets.”

You can’t step foot into the gym, just go through the motions, and expect to experience progress. As mentioned previously, training needs to be legitimately challenging to force your body to grow.

So focus on forcing that growth.

There’s some research evidence that can guide us here as well.

A 2019 study showed that lifting based on relative intensity, as opposed to lifting to muscular failure, resulted in greater muscle growth. This supports a growing pool of research that suggests you don’t — or possibly shouldn’t — go to failure on every exercise in order to try to build muscle, but instead you should lift with an intensity that gets you very close to failure with regularity.

By staying shy of failure, you’re able to manage fatigue better and train for longer before needing to take a de-load week. You can still experience effective muscle growth by staying a few reps away from complete muscular failure.

So how can you apply this?

A simple way is using a rep-match progression with your training. With a rep-match progression, the goal is to try to match, or improve on your performance from the previous training session by adding reps to each exercise.

If you’re continually adding at least one rep to your exercises, it means your relatively intensity is going up over time and you’re challenging yourself more and more. It also means your relatively intensity is shy of failure, because you’re able to improve upon the previous week, recover, and do it again the following week.

Another way to lift close to failure, but not actually hit failure, is to pay attention to your rep cadence for each exercise. Typically, the speed of each rep will decline as you get closer and closer to muscular failure. The more your reps slow down, the closer you are.

Be sure to document this progress, and also note when you’re getting within 1-2 reps of failure. Ideally, the majority of your training is within 1-4 reps of muscular failure, and only at the very end of a training block will you push past those limits and experience failure.

Form and Technique

The third and final point is to prioritize form and technique with all of your exercises while using adequate training volume and relative intensity.

This is all about targeting the desired muscle or muscle group and giving it as much quality work as possible.

Let’s use an example of incorrect form and technique to explain why it’s so important…

If you’re wildly swaying back and forth for every rep of a set of bicep curls, you’re not effectively targeting your biceps. Instead, you’re using your lower body, shoulders, back, etc. to throw the weight up and down.

That’s pointless.

You don’t do bicep curls to train your back.

So train smarter.

Instead, lighten the load and focus on strict form and technique. Try to feel your biceps curling the weight all the way up, squeeze the muscle with a nice hard contraction at the top, and then lower the weight back down under control.

THAT is how you stimulate a muscle and cause muscle growth.

So for each exercise, make sure you’re clear on the muscle group(s) you’re training, and do everything you can to challenge that muscle group(s) with proper form and technique.

Consider recording yourself doing a set of each exercise, and then review it after your workout. Take a hard look at what you’re doing well, and what you can improve on. And then set goals to improve your form and technique in the following training session.

Progress with building muscle lies in the details.

Don’t Forget: Nutrition Matters

I know you’re looking for the answer of how much weight should you lift to build muscle? But we can’t talk about building muscle without at least mentioning nutrition.

Nutrition is a major piece to the puzzle of recovering from your training sessions and actually building muscle. So here are a few quick tips you can use to get your nutrition in line with your goals:

1. Get in a calorie surplus (taking in more calories than you burn)
2. Eat adequate protein each day (~1g per pound of your bodyweight)
3. Eat mostly whole, nutritious foods

It doesn’t matter how hard you train, or how much weight you lift. If you’re not eating enough calories and protein and/or if you’re consistently eating mostly non-nutritious foods, progress is going to be difficult.

How Much Weight Should You Lift to Build Muscle?

Hopefully by now you can tell, the answer to this question isn’t some exact number.

It’s not, “well you should squat 225 for 3 sets of 8 reps, and then bench 185 for 3 sets of 10-12, and…”

The answer to how much weight should you lift to build muscle is very nuanced, and it’s uniquely different for each and every person.

But the concept, regardless of who you are, is going to be the same.

1. You need to train legitimately hard, and then train harder and harder over time.
2. You need adequate training volume and intensity.
3. You need to prioritize form and technique and really maximize the stimulus to the muscle.
4. And you need to do all of these things consistently for a long period of time.

That’s the magic — doing things mostly right, consistently, for a long time.

If you are consistent if your pursuit of building muscle by focusing on these principles, you WILL make progress. It’s just a matter of time.

I hope this helps!

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Thanks for reading this article! I hope you found it helpful. If you have more questions about lifting weights to build muscle, or are interested in customized online coaching to pursue your goals, contact me. I’m happy to help! And check out my coaching page to learn more about online coaching.

~ Chris