What tonnage is, exactly
Tonnage — also called volume load — is sets multiplied by reps multiplied by the weight on the bar, summed across everything you did. Five sets of five at 225 is 5,625. Add four sets of eight at 155 and you have another 4,960. Keep going and a full session lands somewhere in the tens of thousands, which is a satisfying number to write down and a treacherous one to interpret.
The arithmetic is trivial and completely unambiguous. Everything difficult about tonnage is in what people do with it afterwards.
Why comparing tonnage across lifts is meaningless
Consider three sets of twelve curls at 40 lb, which is 1,440 of tonnage, against three sets of twelve squats at 225 lb, which is 8,100. The squats produce five and a half times the number. They do not produce five and a half times the training effect on anything, because the two figures are measuring different quantities that happen to share a unit.
The load a lift can carry is determined by how much muscle is involved and how favourable the leverage is, not by how hard the set was. A biceps curl is limited by one small muscle at a mechanical disadvantage. A deadlift recruits most of the posterior chain through a much better lever. Comparing their tonnage is like comparing the fuel burned by a truck and a motorbike to decide which trip was more difficult for the driver. The same objection kills every cross-person comparison too, since a heavier and taller lifter moves more weight through a longer range on identical programming.
What the number is genuinely useful for
Tonnage works when the comparison is like against like: the same session, the same exercises, the same person, at two points in time. Under those conditions everything that made the cross-lift comparison invalid stays constant and cancels, and what is left is a real signal about whether the work went up.
| Comparison | Worth anything? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Your Tuesday session now vs six weeks ago | Yes | Same lifts, same body, only the work changed |
| Your squat day vs your bench day | No | Different muscle mass and leverage, not different effort |
| Your total vs a training partner | No | Body size and limb length dominate the figure |
| This training block vs last block, same template | Cautiously | Works if the exercise selection barely changed |
| A high-rep week vs a heavy low-rep week | No | Tonnage systematically favours the high-rep week |
That last row is the trap that catches people mid-program. A deliberately heavy, low-rep week produces less tonnage than the lighter week before it, and reading that as a drop in training would be exactly backwards.
Counting sets instead
The measure most training research uses when it talks about volume is not tonnage but the number of hard sets performed per muscle group per week. The reason is that a set taken near failure is roughly a unit of stimulus regardless of the load, which makes it far more portable across exercises than a pound figure. That is why this tool reports set counts by group alongside the tonnage, and why the group column is the one worth writing in a notebook.
The grouping is deliberately yours to define. Type whatever labels you use after a vertical bar — legs, push, pull, or something more granular — and the tool adds up what you have told it rather than guessing which muscles an exercise you named actually uses. Assigning a compound lift to a single group is always an approximation, since a row trains rather more than the label suggests, and no automatic classifier would make that any less approximate.
What this page has no opinion on
How much volume you should do is not a question with a general answer, and nothing here is a recommendation. The research on set counts describes group averages with very wide individual spread, and how much anyone can usefully absorb depends on recovery, training experience, everything else in the week, and how close to failure the sets actually are. A number that works for one person is a stalled month for another.
What this tool does is add up what you actually did, so that when you change something you can see what changed. If you are working out where the load for those sets comes from, the RPE converter and the one rep max calculator are the pages for that; if you are working out where the load is going over the coming weeks, the progressive overload planner is. And if a session hurts in a way that is sharp, sits inside a joint or lasts for days, that is not a volume question at all and belongs with a physiotherapist.
Questions people ask
Should warm-up sets count towards tonnage?
Usually not, and consistency matters more than which side you land on. The argument for excluding them is that a ramp of light singles and doubles adds tonnage without adding meaningful stimulus, and it varies with how you happened to feel that day, so including it adds noise to the one comparison the number is good for. The argument for including them is that they are real work your body did. Pick one, apply it every time, and never compare a total that included warm-ups against one that did not. The warm-up set planner reports its own ramp tonnage separately for exactly this reason.
How do I count bodyweight exercises like chin-ups and dips?
Enter your body weight as the load, plus anything added on a belt. A 180 lb person doing three sets of six chin-ups has moved 3,240 lb of body through the range, and pretending it is zero makes the session total useless. If you use assistance from a band or a machine, subtract a reasonable estimate of the assistance, and accept that the estimate is soft. What you must not do is switch conventions between sessions, since the change you are trying to see is smaller than the difference between counting body weight and not.
Is more tonnage always better?
No, and treating it as a target is the fastest way to make the number counterproductive. Tonnage rewards higher reps at lighter loads, so anyone chasing the figure will drift towards lighter, longer sets whether or not that serves what they are training for. It also takes no account of proximity to failure — three sets of ten with five reps left in the tank produces the same tonnage as three sets of ten with one, and they are not the same session. Use it as a description of what you did, not as a score to beat.
What about tempo, range of motion and rest times?
None of them appear in the arithmetic, and all of them change the training effect. A slow eccentric, a full range of motion and a short rest all make the same sets times reps times weight considerably harder, and tonnage cannot see any of it. This is another reason the number only works against itself: if you keep those variables roughly constant across the sessions you compare, they cancel out. If you change your tempo and your tonnage stays flat, the session got harder and the number will not tell you.
Why does the tool make me type the muscle groups?
Because guessing them from exercise names would be wrong often enough to be worse than useless, and it would be confidently wrong, which is worse still. Names vary between lifters, the same movement can be programmed for different purposes, and every compound lift trains several groups in proportions that depend on how the individual performs it. Typing your own labels means the totals reflect how you actually think about your training rather than how a lookup table guessed. Leaving the label off is fine too — those lines collect under "ungrouped" and still count towards the session total.