There is no single best muscle building workout for everyone. Each person has different goals, time availability, experience level and personal preferences. All these factors play into your decision about which routine is best for you. However... what if... gun to the head, I was forced to pick the muscle building program I thought was the best, based on more than 40 years of lifting, including for bodybuilding competition training? Read this post to see my #1 choice...

One of the biggest debates in bodybuilding in the past decade has been about whether a higher or lower training frequency is better. Early studies that compared training only once a week to twice a week seemed to suggest twice a week builds more muscle and that's what most trainers heavily promoted. But more recent studies that were better designed have increased our understanding of this subject.

How often should you train each muscle per week? Over the last decade, a number of studies suggested that hitting each muscle twice a week is ideal and that a low frequency like working each muscle only once a week is not optimal. Recently a group of researchers carefully designed a study to help us answer this question that is still fiercely debated to this day...

For the last decade or so, one of the most researched and talked about subjects in resistance training has been volume. Specifically, how much volume optimizes muscle growth? We know that initially, when you add training volume, you gain more muscle, but then the amount of gains tapers off. But ultimately, if volume exceeds a certain level, gains flatten out and reverse direction, which indicates the point of overtraining and under-recovery. The million dollar questions are, "how much volume is enough" and could counting sets be the best way to track it?