Zyra Workouts counts working sets per muscle per week against a fixed landmark: 12 for chest, 14 for back, shoulders and quads, 10 for biceps, triceps, hamstrings, glutes, calves and core, and 6 for forearms. Those eleven numbers sum to 120 and are the targets behind the dashboard's coverage bars and body map. They are the app's defaults, not a law — and this page explains where they sit relative to the research, how the app counts a set, and why the whole-week total on its own tells you little.
Zyra Workouts is in development and not yet on the App Store; the screens described here may change before release.
The landmarks we use (table)
A "working set" here means any logged set that is not a warm-up. The app credits it to the exercise's primary muscle at full weight and to each secondary muscle at half. The landmark for each group is a constant in the dashboard code (MUSCLE_LANDMARKS):
| Muscle group | Landmark (working sets / week) |
|---|---|
| Chest | 12 |
| Back | 14 |
| Shoulders | 14 |
| Biceps | 10 |
| Triceps | 10 |
| Forearms | 6 |
| Quads | 14 |
| Hamstrings | 10 |
| Glutes | 10 |
| Calves | 10 |
| Core | 10 |
| Total | `120` |
Why these values and not others? The shape follows the best-known meta-analysis on the question. Schoenfeld, Ogborn and Krieger pooled 34 treatment groups from 15 studies and found a graded dose-response between weekly sets and muscle growth: each additional weekly set was associated with a 0.37% larger percentage gain, and grouping studies into fewer than 5, 5–9 and 10+ sets per muscle showed a trend in the same direction (P = 0.074)1. The app's landmarks sit in and just above that top band for the large groups and at its floor for the small ones. Note the limits: the pooled effect is an average across mostly short studies of mixed populations, and the three-band comparison did not reach conventional significance. A landmark of 14 rather than 12 for back is a design choice inside that range, not a number the paper hands you.
In plain terms: the research says more weekly sets tended to grow more muscle, with 10+ per muscle as the top band studied; the app picks a specific number in that range for each group so it has something to draw a bar against.
Counting secondary muscles at half
The catalog lists a primary muscle and zero or more secondary muscles for every exercise. When you finish a session, each working set adds 1 to the primary and 0.5 to every secondary. Three lifts show how quickly that adds up:
| Exercise (3 working sets) | Primary (+3) | Secondaries (+1.5 each) |
|---|---|---|
| Barbell bench press | chest | triceps, shoulders |
| Back squat | quads | glutes, hamstrings, core |
| Conventional deadlift | back | hamstrings, glutes, forearms |
So a week with nine sets of bench press and nothing else shows chest at 9 / 12, triceps at 4.5 / 10 and shoulders at 4.5 / 14. The half-credit is a deliberate simplification: the catalog does not grade how hard each secondary works in each lift, so the app treats every secondary the same. If you want a muscle counted in full, it needs an exercise where it is the primary.
The weekly window is Monday to Sunday (the code takes the current week's Monday at midnight as its start), and the dashboard rounds the displayed total to a whole set while using the unrounded value for the coverage bar. The weekly sets calculator on this site runs the same arithmetic on a planned week, without the rounding, so you can see the 4.5s.
Why weekly totals mislead
A total of 120 working sets in a week sounds like a complete program. It can also be a program with 40 sets of chest and no legs. The app therefore never shows the total as a pass mark; it shows eleven bars and a balance score that drops when coverage is uneven.
Three things a bare total hides:
- Distribution. The same 60 sets spread across eleven groups and piled onto three groups produce identical totals and very different weeks.
- Effort. A set stopped five reps short of failure and a set taken to failure both count as one. The app carries a separate effort measure (from logged RIR — reps in reserve, how many more you could have done) so set counts and set hardness are not confused.
- Double counting through secondaries. A day of rows, pull-ups and deadlifts credits forearms half a set each time. Forearms can pass its landmark of 6 without a single forearm exercise, which is why that landmark is the lowest.
This is arithmetic, not a trial result: the meta-analysis above counted sets per muscle, and so does the app; a whole-body number was never the unit anyone studied.
Adjusting for a focus muscle
The landmarks are constants — the current build does not let you edit them. What you can change is the plan feeding them. The program generator accepts up to three focus muscles and up to three deprioritised muscles: a focus muscle gets an extra isolation exercise in any session whose roster includes it, and a deprioritised muscle is skipped when the generator fills the remaining slots with isolation work. In a self-built program the same effect comes from adding an exercise whose primary muscle is the one you want to move.
Two honest caveats. First, a muscle over its landmark is shown as "at or over target"; the app does not model diminishing returns above it. Second, raising one group's weekly sets while holding the session length fixed means another group gives up a slot — the generator caps exercises per session at eight, and a longer list is a longer session, not a denser one. The program guide walks through the whole trade.
The short version
Zyra Workouts counts working sets per muscle per week — primary at 1, secondary at 0.5, warm-ups at 0 — against landmarks of 12 (chest), 14 (back, shoulders, quads), 10 (biceps, triceps, hamstrings, glutes, calves, core) and 6 (forearms). The numbers sit in the top band of the published dose-response work1 and are defaults for a coverage bar, not a rule. Plan a week in the weekly sets calculator to see where it lands before you train it.
Educational overview only — training guidance, not medical advice.