How Should I Track Training Volume? | Strength Training

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Your training volume is a measure of how much work you've put in. It's useful to track because how much work you do is an important driver for building muscle and strength. Doing too little leads to no or slow progress, while doing too much is a waste of your time and can even lead to overtraining and injury.

What's the best way to track your training volume though?

While there are a few metrics for tracking training volume, the two that I would recommend are hard sets and Work Score.

Hard Sets

The basic premise of hard sets is that you track the number sets that are done at or above the level of effort needed to stimulate optimal muscle growth and strength adaptations. As a general guideline, a set is considered hard if it is done within 4 reps or less from failure. This works best if the reps for the set are between 5 and 30, but sets outside this range can still certainly be considered hard.

Simple, right? But is it too simple? While hard sets overlook a few variables, the variables they don't account for don't matter that much when tracking training volume.

Hard sets don't take reps or rep ranges into account. The rep range you train in does matter, but it doesn't matter as much as most people think. For more information, check out this article.

Hard sets don't precisely track the level of effort of each set. A set counts the same whether it's 4 reps from failure or to failure. While this might seem like a problem, the stimulus from going 4 reps from failure to failure is close enough to overlook. That being said, I wouldn't advise going to failure too often as it generates significantly more fatigue without providing significantly more stimulus.

Hard sets don't take rest times into account. Getting sufficient rest (1-5 minutes) between sets is important since it allows you to do more actual work with the effort you put in. And your body responds to the actual work you put in, not just the effort. This is why things like drop sets are not as effective. While this does matter, no method of tracking training volume has a way to account for this, so it's up to you to ensure you're sufficiently rested for each set.

All in all, hard sets cut through the noise and track what's truly important in training volume: the number of sets done with high enough effort.

Work Score

Work Score is WorkedOutFitness' attempt to improve upon hard sets and tracking overall training volume. It is automatically calculated when tracking your workouts on WorkedOut. The direct improvement is that it precisely tracks the level of effort of each set. This solves two of the problems with hard sets.

The first is that a set to failure counts as more volume than a set 4 reps from failure. This is useful because a set to failure is significantly more fatiguing than a set 4 reps from failure. The second is that it counts sets that are below 4 reps from failure. These sets, while not optimal for stimulating muscle and strength adaptations, still have an effect.

Work Score also takes the overall difficulty of the exercise into account. For example, performing deadlifts will produce a higher Work Score than performing an equal number of curls at the same level of effort.

Work Score is used for cardio and power volume tracking as well and each score is meant to be directly comparable to another. Each component has a weekly range between 0 and 100, with 100 representing the training volume done by world class athletes. As an example, an intermediate strength trainee who does some cardio on their off days may have a strength Work Score of 50 and a cardio Work Score of 25.

If you're interested in tracking your training volume with Work Score, check out Worked Out Fitness' free workout tracking features. Most exercises will automatically calculate a Work Score when logged. Sign up for free today!