Strength calculator
Volume landmarks calculator
Score your weekly hard sets against MEV, MAV and MRV — the volume landmarks Mike Israetel and Renaissance Periodization publish for each muscle group. The grid opens on a real training week: edit the set counts and see which muscles are under-trained, which are in the productive range, and which are past what you can recover from. Free, instant, no sign-up.
Your week, muscle by muscle
Count hard sets — sets taken within a few reps of failure — over a whole week, including the ones a muscle gets as a close secondary. A heavy row is back work and biceps work; a dip is chest and triceps.
Glutes, front delts, traps and abs are published with an MEV of zero. That is not a rounding artefact: for most trainees, squats, presses, rows and carries already deliver enough stimulus to those groups that zero direct sets can still be a growing amount of work.
These are population guidelines, not a personal prescription. Israetel has been explicit that individual MRV swings enormously with training age, sleep, calories, stress and exercise selection — two lifters reading the same 22 here might really be at 14 and 30. Use the table to spot the muscles that are obviously mis-dosed, then calibrate the rest against your own recovery over a block.
The grid says which muscles are mis-dosed — the coach rebuilds the week so the sets actually land there.
What are MEV, MAV and MRV?
They are volume landmarks: four weekly set counts that mark out where training stops being pointless, where it stops being productive, and where it starts costing more than it returns. MV is the maintenance volume that holds the muscle you have. MEV, the minimum effective volume, is the fewest weekly sets that actually grow it. MAV, the maximum adaptive volume, is the range where the sets return the most per set. MRV, the maximum recoverable volume, is the most you can do and still be recovered by the next session for that muscle. Dr Mike Israetel and the Renaissance Periodization team put the framework into circulation with a per-muscle table, and it has been the default way strength coaches talk about volume ever since.
How this calculator works
Enter your weekly hard sets for each muscle and every row is placed against the published landmarks for that group. If the count is under MEV the row is flagged and the calculator tells you how many sets are missing. If it sits inside MAV the row is in the productive range and the gap is zero. If it is past MRV the row is flagged the other way, with the number of sets to cut. The "To MAV" column is a signed number: positive means add that many sets to reach the bottom of the adaptive range, negative means cut that many to come back to the top of it. MAV is kept as a range throughout rather than collapsed into a single target, because that is how the source publishes it — the adaptive volume is a band you move through across a block, not a number you hit.
What counts as a hard set?
A hard set is a working set taken within roughly one to four reps of failure. Warm-ups do not count, and neither does a set you stopped because the clock said so. Sets where the muscle is a close secondary do count: a barbell row is back volume and biceps volume, a dip is chest volume and triceps volume, a squat is quad volume and some hamstring and glute volume. This is where most people's numbers go wrong in both directions — someone convinced they are under-training arms is often at fifteen effective biceps sets once the rows are counted, and someone certain they train chest hard is at eight once the half-effort last set is dropped. If you are not sure whether a set counted, it probably did not.
How much do these numbers apply to you?
Less than the precision of the table suggests. The landmarks were derived from coaching a large but particular population, and RP has always presented them as starting points to calibrate from rather than limits to obey. Training age moves them, and so do sleep, calories, life stress, exercise selection and how close to failure you actually train. The honest way to use the table is directionally: four sets of calves a week is under-dosed for essentially everyone, twenty-eight sets of abs is over-dosed for essentially everyone, and the muscles sitting comfortably inside their range are not the ones to spend attention on. Where your own MRV really sits is something you find by running volume up until performance drops, not by reading it off a chart.
Using the landmarks across a mesocycle
The framework is not a set of targets to hit every week — it is a ramp. Start a block near MEV, add a set or two per muscle per week while performance holds, and let the volume climb through the MAV range. When reps start dropping at the same load, soreness stops clearing between sessions, and motivation for that muscle's session goes flat, you have found the neighbourhood of your MRV — deload to somewhere near MV, then start the next block a little above where the last one started. Muscles that finished a block under MEV are the ones to fix first; muscles that finished over MRV are where the recovery for everything else went.