Free tool
Count the hard sets you trained for each muscle group over the last seven days, type them in, and the chart fills in. This sets per muscle group calculator gives a thirty-second answer to the question every split eventually raises — am I training all my muscle groups evenly, or has one of them quietly dropped off the schedule?
Hard sets, last 7 days
Shaded ring = 10–20 hard sets. The chart tops out at 30; anything higher is drawn at the rim but counted in full below.
Fill in the sets above and this is where the gaps show up.
| Muscle group | Hard sets | Reading |
|---|
This page applies one general published range — roughly 10 to 20 hard sets per muscle group per week — equally to every muscle and to every person who loads it. About 10 sets is a commonly cited minimum-effective figure for hypertrophy, and about 20 is the point where extra sets typically stop paying for themselves. That upper end is softer than a round number makes it look: the more recent analyses read it as returns that keep arriving but keep shrinking, rather than as a ceiling. Both figures are general guidelines drawn from group averages.
The ten groups are this page's own coarse split, chosen so that a week can be counted by hand in a couple of minutes — not the way FORGE REPS divides up the body. And one mismatch worth naming: the how-to below asks you to count indirect work, while the studies behind the 10–20 range mostly counted sets that trained a muscle directly. That is why it says to count an indirect set as roughly half, which keeps your totals closer to the yardstick they are being held against.
Real training is not that tidy either. Your calves and your back do not respond to the same number, a set you took to failure is not the set someone else logged under the same name, and a week you slept badly is not the same week on paper. FORGE REPS is not being built to work the way this page works. This checker can only tell you how your week compares to a number written for everybody. The app is being built to answer the narrower and far more useful question: whether the week was short for you.
So treat this as a rough sanity check you can run in half a minute — useful for spotting a muscle group that has fallen off the schedule entirely, not a personalised recommendation, and not medical advice.
Open your training log and go back seven days. For each muscle group, count every hard set that trained it directly. Then go back through and find the work that trained it indirectly — barbell rows are back sets, but they are biceps sets too; dips are chest and triceps; squats put real work through quads and, at depth, glutes — and add those in at roughly half a set each. People who count only what the exercise is named after end up convinced their arms are neglected when they are not; people who count every assisting muscle at full value end up with a week that looks complete on paper and thin in the mirror. Half is the rough compromise, and it keeps your totals comparable to the 10–20 range, which was mostly measured on direct sets.
Type each total into the matching field. Halves are fine — the table rounds each total to the nearest whole set. The radar chart redraws as you go, and the table underneath repeats every number in plain text. A balanced week looks like a shape that roughly follows the shaded ring. A spike pointing at one label and a dent opposite it is the pattern this training volume calculator exists to make obvious.
A hard set is a working set taken close to muscular failure — near enough that only a couple of clean reps were left in reserve. A set you stopped well short of that, or one you finished without the last few reps ever feeling difficult, is training volume you performed but not a hard set. Count sets, not exercises: three sets of bench press is three hard sets for chest, not one. Warm-ups and ramp-up sets do not count, and including them is the fastest way to make a thin week look complete.
Weekly hard sets per muscle group is the unit most training research uses to talk about volume, because it is the one that survives differences in split, exercise selection and session length. Two people can train wildly differently and still be comparable on this axis. It is also the number that exposes what a session-by-session log hides. Nobody plans to skip a muscle group. But on push-pull-legs, a leg day missed twice a month is not two sessions out of a long list — it is nearly half of that day gone, because there are only about four of them in a month. Every group trained on that day drops together, so the split still looks balanced while quads, hamstrings and glutes all quietly slide toward the bottom of the range. Weekly sets is the view where that shows up; a log full of completed sessions is not.
Undertrained muscle groups are usually a scheduling problem rather than a motivation problem. The fix is to add sets gradually rather than jumping straight to the middle of the range: two or three extra hard sets a week for that group, held for a few weeks before adding more, is a change you can recover from and, more importantly, attribute. Doubling a muscle group's volume overnight mostly buys soreness and a week of worse sessions everywhere else.
Attaching the new sets to a session that already exists beats inventing a new one. If we had to guess which two groups come up empty on a workout balance tracker most often, it would be calves and core — not because we have counted, but because they are the ones that sit at the end of a session and get cut first when time runs short. They are also the two that cost the least to bolt onto a session you were doing anyway. If the chart shows a group above 20, nothing is automatically wrong — but it is worth asking what that volume is costing the nine groups it shares your week, your sleep and your joints with.
Run the check again in a month. One reading is a snapshot; what actually matters is whether the same dent is still there after you tried to fix it. That is the part a muscle group tracker you have to fill in by hand will never do for you, and the reason the app exists.
The range most commonly published for hypertrophy is roughly 10 to 20 hard sets per muscle group per week, with about 10 treated as a common minimum-effective figure and about 20 as the point where extra sets typically stop paying for themselves. It is a general guideline drawn from group averages, not a target that has been checked against you, your training history or your recovery.
No. Warm-up sets, ramp-up sets and anything light enough that you could have kept going almost indefinitely are not hard sets and should be left out of the count. Include them and every muscle group will look better covered than it is, which defeats the point of running the check.
Not automatically. Some trainees handle more, particularly for a muscle group they have prioritised for a while and built up to slowly. It is a prompt to check the things volume costs you: sleep, joint comfort, whether the sets late in a session are still hard for the right reason, and whether the other nine muscle groups are being paid for out of the same budget.
No — it is a one-week snapshot you assemble by hand, and it treats every muscle group and every lifter the same. Neglected muscle groups tend to appear over months, not weeks, which is exactly the span that hand-counting cannot cover.
This page gives every muscle and every lifter the same generic range, because a static page has nothing else to go on — and it only knows the one week you just typed in. FORGE REPS is being built to answer the harder version of the question: not whether your week clears a number written for everybody, but whether your training is actually going where you think it is. No hand-counting, no spreadsheet, no seven-day memory test. It launches in the browser first — join the waiting list and you will hear the day it opens.