Fitness coach Jeff Cavaliere is taking the guesswork out of training. In a recent YouTube video shared on June 2, 2025, he explained how building size and strength differ from each other.
Boasting over 14 million YouTube subscribers, Cavaliere’s ATHLEAN-X channel is one of the most popular in the fitness sector. He curates scientific research and incorporates it into his demonstrations, helping lifters and gym enthusiasts reach their goals, which are often different.
Jeff Cavaliere Details How to Train for Hypertrophy or Strength
Below, you can find a quick overview of the principles he discussed in his recent YouTube video:
- Technique Focus
- Rep Ranges
- Volume
- Fatigue Tolerance
- Recovery
- Session Variety
- Movement Flexibility
Technique Focus
First and foremost, Cavaliere underscored that technique should reflect your training goal, whether it’s adding size or improving strength.
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“What is the goal of your training when you’re focusing on size versus strength? If you’re focusing on building bigger muscles, you want to make your workouts and the exercises that you do as inefficient as possible. If you’re trying to build strength, you want to become as efficient as possible.”
Rep Ranges
For hypertrophy, he explained that rep ranges can vary greatly.
“If you want to build muscle, then here’s the other interesting thing about this. Your rep ranges can be all over the map. Anywhere between five and now research shows 30, even maybe a little higher than that, 35, but you need to learn how to take yourselves to extremely high levels of effort, especially as those rep ranges get higher and higher. What I mean is you have to learn to train to failure.”
In contrast, when pursuing strength, he shared that rep ranges are usually 1-3, similar to how a powerlifter trains.
“When you’re peaking for a meet, if you’re a powerlifter, it’s usually singles, doubles, and triples. The whole point of strength training is you do not want to take those exercises to failure. You want to grind those reps out and be able to complete them.”
Volume
As for volume, he said those after hypertrophy should aim for 9-20 sets throughout the week. If strength is the goal, he recommended 5-15 sets per week.
“Typically, most muscle groups are responding somewhere between a 9-20 sets range throughout a given week [for hypertrophy].”
“For strength training, usually you’re going to want 5-15 sets per movement per week,” he adds.
Fatigue Tolerance
He adds that when building muscle, it’s more appropriate to chase fatigue, whereas for strength, that could be costly to gains.
“Fatigue is what we’re chasing when we look for that inefficient movement that we talked about with hypertrophy, that inefficient approach to make the muscle uncomfortable to force it and squeeze every gain out of that muscle, well, that would be death to strength. We do not want to be going to these places of extreme fatigue if we want to recover.”
Recovery
He emphasized that ‘recovery becomes a real focus’ when aiming for strength.
“How do you recover if you’re inadvertently putting all this stress on your body when you’re trying to get stronger, and you need those repeated sessions to do that. So recovery becomes a real focus when you’re trying to train for strength.”
With regard to building muscle, he confirmed it’s not uncommon to feel more soreness.
“When you’re trying to build muscle, it’s not uncommon for you to feel delayed onset soreness or feel I’m not ready to come back and do a workout,” he shared.
Session Variety
Strength training requires less variability as the goal is to improve specific lifting capabilities.
“If you’re training for strength, you don’t want a lot of variability here. You want specificity of the movement you’re trying to get better at. You’re trying to build a bigger bench, you bench.”
In the realm of hypertrophy, variation can play a major role in helping someone improve their size.
“If you’re looking at hypertrophy, sometimes the variation is necessary,” he explains. “Sometimes we have to hit it with different exercises, different stimulus, different approaches, even a slight angle change.”
Movement Flexibility
Lastly, he emphasized that those building strength should stick with big movements that they are directly trying to improve. Meanwhile, for growing muscle, modifying the same exercise might be more beneficial for reaching goals.
“If you’re trying to build strength, you’re going to want to be as focused as you can be on those big movements, the big lifts, so that you can get better at them.”
“There’s a lot of things we can do to the same exercise and make it actually more intense or have a different end effect that doesn’t require changing the exercise,” shares Cavaliere.
Cavaliere’s wisdom extends beyond building muscle and improving strength. He has also broken down key exercises that can help boost longevity and a better quality of life, all of which can be performed without a heavily equipped gym.
Cavaliere believes he has insights that can help anyone reach their goals. While training for hypertrophy and strength differ greatly, both can be optimized with proper execution, exercise selections, and effort.
RELATED: Jeff Cavaliere Shares His Top 8 Exercises for Gaining Muscle
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