Specialization cycles for better muscle growth

After our previous article on getting and staying lean, this one is all about specialization cycles. We will discuss exactly what they are good for and how you can best design them.

Number of training sets

How many sets per muscle does someone who has just started strength training need to do to build muscle? Only 1 set per week per muscle.

That's enough to give a little muscle building stimulus. After all, a total beginner's body is used to performing 0 sets. 1 set is a much greater load, to which their body will react by building muscle. This does not mean that it would be optimal for them to perform only one set, but it is their so-called minimum effective volume.

But what happens if you now tell an advanced athlete to perform only one set per muscle per week? They will probably laugh at you - and rightly so. The advanced athlete will definitely not build muscle by performing only one set.

Their body is used to a much greater training load through more sets. So the minimum effective volume of an advanced athlete is definitely higher than just one set per muscle per week, as is the case with a beginner.

You can easily remember that the more advanced you are, the more sets you need to do to build muscle. In slightly nerdier terms, this means that the minimum effective volume increases as you become more advanced.

Recovery and overtraining

But of course we also have to consider how many sets we can actually recover from. It's no use if we theoretically need 20 sets to continue building muscle, but we can only recover from 10 sets.

The maximum number of sets we can recover from is called the maximum recoverable volume.

A 2017 study by Amirthalingam and colleagues and a 2018 study by Hackett and colleagues show that beginners who had done more sets actually built less muscle than beginners who had done fewer sets.

This phenomenon, whereby more sets lead to LESS muscle growth, has not yet been observed in advanced athletes. In fact, for advanced athletes, the rule is generally "the more sets, the better" (provided the sets are divided into at least 2 sessions per muscle per week).

The best-known study that is currently getting a lot of attention and that proves this effect is the one by Schoenfeld and colleagues, which was published last year. A study by Brigatto and colleagues published shortly thereafter even suggests that more than 30 sets per muscle per week might be optimal for advanced athletes. But more on that in a moment.

So it seems that the more advanced you are, the more sets you can recover from. So the maximum recoverable volume increases as you become more advanced.

However, Dr. Mike Israetel suspects that in very advanced athletes, the maximum recoverable volume starts to decrease again because they can move enormously high loads per set due to their very good ability to target their muscles perfectly.

For example, if a lifter uses 450 lbs for reps during a deadlift, they will probably need a 5 minute break before they can think clearly again.

A beginner will not be able to perform a set that intense, because their nervous system is not yet so well trained. Accordingly, a beginner strains their recovery capacity per set MUCH less than a very advanced athlete.

However, the fact that the maximum recoverable volume starts to decrease again in very advanced people is only based on non-scientific individual observations and is probably also only the case when someone is very advanced.

We will now focus on the scientifically proven phenomenon, which is that the more advanced you are, the more sets you can handle and NEED to continue building muscle.

Now, of course, the obvious conclusion is to simply perform an enormous number of sets for all muscle groups as an advanced athlete. The studies do say that this is optimal. But what we also have to keep in mind is that these volume training studies usually only last for 8 weeks.

The reason these studies don't last longer is simply because you can't find participants willing to be exposed to a curious scientist's study design for an extended period of time.

It may well be that a very high volume can be tolerated for a period of 8 weeks. The assumption of very many hypertrophy experts such as Dr. Eric Helms, Dr. Mike Israetel, Dr. Brad Schoenfeld, and Lyle McDonalds is that over a longer period of time a very high volume is counterproductive and can lead to overtraining.

Short phases with high volume sometimes go well, but long phases almost never go well. After a few weeks, you feel burnt out and it tweaks e.g. your shoulder, knee, or hip and you don't see much (or any) improvement anymore.

But what do we do now when we are advanced and our muscles need fairly many sets to keep growing?

We have two options: Either we increase the sets for all muscle groups for a maximum period of 8 weeks, or we insert specialization cycles in which we only increase the sets of a few muscle groups and reduce the sets of all other muscle groups.

A disadvantage of the option to increase the sets of all muscle groups is that you will be in the gym for a VERY long time. Also, after this high-volume phase, you will probably need a phase with a much lower overall volume to recover.

This recovery phase will probably last longer than a one-week deload. You don't have these disadvantages with the option with specialization cycles. That's why we will now go into more detail about this option.

We know that the number of sets needed to maintain the mass of a muscle is relatively low. For example, if you need 18 sets per week for your chest to continue to grow, it may very well be that you only need 8 chest sets per week to maintain your chest mass.

This is a very important insight for us! This allows us to greatly reduce the sets for non-focused muscle groups without losing muscle mass.

This gives you more recovery capacity (and also time) for the focused muscle groups, which you can train with a higher number of sets than the minimum effective volume of these focused muscle groups.

Besides knowing that you don't need a lot of sets to maintain a decent amount of muscle mass, we also know another important thing: if you're pushing up the weekly set count for focused muscle groups, then you should also be training those muscle groups at least twice per week.

In fact, James Krieger's analysis of the research shows that it is counterproductive for you to perform more than about 10 sets per muscle group per session.

If you do e.g. 18 sets per week for your chest, then you should not train your chest with these 18 sets in only one session per week, but rather train your chest twice per week with 9 sets each. Everything that goes beyond about 10 sets per muscle group per unit is so-called junk volume, which brings you nothing.

If you want more info on "how many sets should I do in a session?", then read our previous article "How many sets per workout for maximum muscle gain?", where we go into this topic in great detail.

Specialization cycle

Example

Now let's look at a concrete example and see how you can design such a specialization cycle. You have been training regularly, hard, and effectively for several years and in your first specialization cycle you focus on the chest and the lateral deltoids.

Let's start with the chest. Before the specialization cycle, you trained your chest with 12 sets per week, divided into 2 sessions of 6 sets each. Now you increase the weekly sets from 12 to 18 and train the chest 3x per week. So instead of 2x6 sets, you now do 3x6 sets.

Also, you will start these 3 sessions with your chest exercises so that you approach these exercises with full power. Your chest training could then look like this if you train your upper body 3 times a week:

On the first upper body day you will do 3 sets of the barbell bench press and 3 sets of cable flys. On the second upper body day you will do 3 sets on the incline bench press with dumbbells and 3 sets of decline chest press and on the third upper body day you will do 3 sets on the chest press and 3 sets of machine butterflies.

After each of these chest exercises, you will train your other upper body muscles.

Let's move on to the lateral deltoids, which you also want to focus on. Before the specialization cycle, you trained it with 8 sets per week, divided into 2 sessions of 4 sets each. Now you increase the volume to 12 sets per week and train the muscle not twice, but three times per week. So you will do 4 sets, 3x per week.

On the 1st upper body day you will do 4 sets of dumbbell lateral raises, on the 2nd upper body day you will do 4 sets of upright rows with the EZ bar, and on the 3rd upper body day you will do 4 sets of cable lateral raises.

You have now concentrated on 2 muscles and done a total of 10 more sets. So now you need to save these ten sets when working on the other muscles. For example, you do 2 fewer sets for the back, 2 fewer for the biceps, 2 fewer for the quadriceps, 2 fewer for the calves, and 2 fewer for the abs.

That's 10 sets in total. Thus, you do not have to sacrifice more time for the gym and do not overload your body.

Do this for 1-2 training cycles and then focus on other muscle groups. Then, for example, focus on the back and calves and reduce the volume of the remaining muscle groups.

If you have a certain muscle group that's a major weak point, then perform specialization cycles for that muscle group more often, e.g. 3 training cycles of focus and 1 training cycle of no focus, 3 cycles of focus again, etc., until that muscle group is no longer a weak point.

In our example from just now, we didn't put as much focus. We just went from 12 to 18 sets for the chest and from 8 to 12 sets for the lateral deltoids.

In most cases you can make such a jump directly from one training cycle to the next, if you have not had any problems with the involved tendons, ligaments, joints, or of course muscles in the past.

If the jump is bigger, then first work your way up within a training cycle with a set progression for those focused muscle groups.

This way you give your body time to gradually get used to a higher load on the focused muscle groups along with the passive structures involved, and you lower the risk of injuring yourself.

For example, let's say you want to focus very strongly on your chest and increase your weekly chest sets from 12 to 24. Then you should increase the volume within a cycle of e.g. 5 weeks from 12 sets in the 1st week by 2-3 sets per week until you have reached 24 sets in the 5th week.

In the next cycle, you will either stay at 24 sets each week if you normally train without set progression, or you will continue to train with set progression.

If you choose to make use of set progression, then start with e.g. 20 sets in the 1st week and increase by 2 sets every week until you are at 28 sets in the 5th week. This corresponds on average to your targeted 24 sets per week for the chest.

Tips

By the way, only perform specialization cycles if you are already advanced. As a beginner, you can train all muscles evenly and will make good progress, since your minimum effective volume per muscle group is quite low.

You should also not be in a caloric deficit when performing specialization cycles. This is because a calorie deficit increases your maintenance volume and decreases your minimum effective volume and maximum recoverable volume.

In very simple terms, this means, for one thing, that you need to do more sets per muscle to maintain them. This means that you can't go too low with the sets per muscle group or you'll lose muscle mass because the anabolic training stimulus to get those muscle groups won't work against the very catabolic signals of the diet.

On the other hand, this means that you should not do too many sets per muscle group, since otherwise your muscles will not be able to recover properly and you will end up losing muscle mass. So you have less leeway with your sets and should train your muscles in a relatively balanced way.