Three numbers that turn a weekly guess into a plan you can actually progress.
Volume landmarks are three numbers per muscle group, expressed in working sets per week. MEV is the minimum that produces growth. MAV is the range where most of your productive work should sit. MRV is the ceiling past which you are accumulating fatigue you will not recover from. The framework was popularised by Renaissance Periodization and Mike Israetel, and it is the reason so many lifters now talk about their training in sets per week rather than in exercises per session.
The point is not the numbers. The point is that you decide them once, at the start of a block, and then progress against them. Most people re-litigate volume every single week, in the gym, while tired, and call the result autoregulation. It is not autoregulation. It is having no plan and reacting.
You start a block near MEV, usually deliberately lower than what you could handle. Each week you add a small amount of volume, typically a set or two on the muscles you are prioritising. You keep climbing until performance stops improving or recovery visibly degrades, which is your practical MRV for this block, then you deload and start the next one from a slightly higher floor.
The framework is doing something specific: it converts a vague feeling into a decision with a direction. "Am I doing enough chest?" has no answer. "I am at 12 sets, I started at 10, and last week's numbers went up" has an obvious next step.
Underneath it is a real research finding, and it is worth knowing exactly how much it supports. Schoenfeld, Ogborn and Krieger published a meta-regression in 2017 across 34 treatment groups drawn from 15 studies, examining how total weekly resistance training volume relates to gains in muscle mass. Weekly set count is a genuine dose variable with a measurable relationship to growth. That is what makes landmarks worth having.
What that paper does not do is hand you your numbers. Any specific MEV or MRV figure you have seen is a coaching heuristic built on top of the dose-response idea, not a published constant, and it will not be the same for your chest and your calves or for you and the person next to you. Treat published landmark tables as starting positions to test, not as measurements of yourself.
There is also a second variable hiding inside the first. Ten sets taken to 3 RIR and ten sets taken to failure are not the same dose. Robinson and colleagues, in a 2024 series of meta-regressions, found that muscle size increased as sets ended closer to failure, and Refalo and colleagues' 2023 review found only a trivial advantage for going all the way. So a set count only means something next to the effort it was taken at, which is why proximity to failure needs its own plan. If your RIR targets drift mid-block instead of moving on a plan, your set counts stop being comparable.
You start a block at 12 working sets of chest per week: four on a flat press, four on an incline, four on a fly variation. Week two you add a set to the incline, so 13. Week three another, 14. Everything is still going up.
Week four you add a seventh incline set for 15, and this time the numbers do not move. Your top set drops a rep. Soreness lingers into the next session.
That is the useful information the whole framework exists to produce: 14 worked, 15 did not, this block. Next block you start at 12 again and you already know where the roof is. Without the count you would have known only that week four felt bad, which is a feeling, not a finding.
Recorded as: chest 12 -> 15 sets/wk across 4 weeks, performance broke at 15.
Fire Your Coach counts your weekly sets per muscle group from what you actually did, not from what the plan said. Those are different numbers the moment you swap an exercise or cut a set short, and the difference is the entire point of tracking it.
A count still needs a first number to start from. If you do not have one of your own yet, the commonly cited weekly ranges for each muscle group are on how many sets per muscle group, framed the way this page frames landmarks: a starting position for your first block, not a measurement of you.
MAV appears in the app as a reference band rather than a target to hit. It is there so you can see where this week sits relative to where you have been, which is the comparison that means something. How to line two blocks up so that comparison is honest — what to log, and the two patterns that mean something changed — is on how to track volume across blocks.
Because deviations are stored as typed data rather than free text, a block where you consistently dropped the last set shows up as a volume story rather than as a vague sense that the block went badly.
The papers behind the empirical claims on this page, with the population each one studied. Where we could confirm only what a study set out to measure and not the size of what it found, the note says so rather than borrowing the paper's authority for a number nobody read.
Brad J Schoenfeld et al. (2017). Dose-response relationship between weekly resistance training volume and increases in muscle mass: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Sports Sciences.
Systematically reviewed the effect of total weekly resistance training volume on measures of muscle mass by meta-regression. The final analysis comprised 34 treatment groups from 15 studies.
Meta-regression over 34 treatment groups drawn from 15 studies.Zac P Robinson et al. (2024). Exploring the Dose-Response Relationship Between Estimated Resistance Training Proximity to Failure, Strength Gain, and Muscle Hypertrophy: A Series of Meta-Regressions. Sports Medicine.
Estimated RIR had a negligible relationship with strength gains in all best-fit models. For hypertrophy, the slopes were negative with confidence intervals excluding null: muscle size increased as sets ended closer to failure. Conclusion: strength gains were similar across a wide range of RIR, while hypertrophy improves as sets are terminated closer to failure.
Series of meta-regressions on estimated proximity to failure (RIR) across the existing literature.Martin C Refalo et al. (2023). Influence of Resistance Training Proximity-to-Failure on Skeletal Muscle Hypertrophy: A Systematic Review with Meta-analysis. Sports Medicine.
Trivial advantage for training to set failure versus non-failure for hypertrophy across any failure definition (ES 0.19, 95% CI 0.00 to 0.37, p = 0.045), with no moderating effect of volume load or relative load. No advantage for momentary muscular failure specifically (ES 0.12, 95% CI -0.13 to 0.37, p = 0.343). The authors conclude there is no evidence that training to momentary muscular failure is superior for hypertrophy, and suggest a potentially non-linear relationship.
Systematic review; searches of PubMed, SCOPUS and SPORTDiscus identified 15 studies.They are three weekly set counts per muscle group. MEV is the minimum effective volume, the least that still produces growth. MAV is the maximum adaptive volume, the range where most productive training sits. MRV is the maximum recoverable volume, the ceiling past which you accumulate fatigue you will not recover from. The framework was popularised by Renaissance Periodization.
Nobody can give you your own number honestly, including us. Schoenfeld, Ogborn and Krieger established across 34 treatment groups that weekly volume has a real dose-response relationship with muscle growth, which is why counting is worth doing. It does not produce a per-person figure. What coaching practice does offer is a commonly cited starting range for each muscle group, and our answer on how many sets per muscle group per week lists them. Start a block near the bottom of the range for what you are prioritising, add a set or two a week, and record the point where progress stops.
Almost certainly not, and this is the biggest weakness in counting raw sets. How close a set is taken to failure is its own studied variable. Robinson and colleagues' 2024 meta-regressions found that muscle size increased as sets ended closer to failure, so the effort behind a set changes what it is worth. The practical consequence: plan how your RIR targets move across a block, and do not let them drift, or your set counts stop being comparable from one block to the next.
Partly. The counting discipline is useful to anyone doing meaningful resistance training, because it turns "am I doing enough" into an answerable question. The specific landmark framing suits hypertrophy blocks best. If you are peaking for strength, volume is supposed to come down and the framework stops being the right lens. If you are training for an event, session quality and conditioning load usually matter more than set totals.
Describe what you are training for and Fire Your Coach builds the block, carries the prescription onto the set, and remembers what the method actually produced.