Doing around 11 sets of exercises per workout is the sweet spot for building muscle. If you do more than that, your muscles won't grow any noticeably faster or bigger.

Not all sets count the same—sets that directly target the muscle you're measuring matter more, and a method that gives partial credit to indirect sets works best for predicting results.

Doing more sets of weightlifting in one session can help you build bigger muscles and get stronger, but after a certain point, doing even more sets doesn’t help much—around 2 sets is enough for strength, and 11 sets is enough for muscle growth.

When you're lifting weights, whether you do exercises that target one muscle at a time or ones that work multiple muscles together can change how well we can guess how much muscle you'll build or how much stronger you'll get—and using a special way to measure the workload (called 'fractional') works best for making those guesses.

Some trainers count all your lifts to measure workout volume, but this claim says a smarter way is to count only the hard sets fully and give half credit to the lighter, supporting ones — and that this method actually predicts muscle growth and strength gains better than the other ways.

How you count your weightlifting sets—whether you count every little part or just the full sets—can change how we think about how much lifting helps you get stronger versus bigger muscles.