Even if you don’t lift heavier or do more workouts after six months, your muscles can still get stronger — your brain and nerves are probably getting better at telling your muscles when and how to...

People get noticeably stronger in just 4 weeks of heavy weightlifting—even before their muscles get bigger—because their nerves learn to fire better.

If you're new to lifting weights, doing a moderate amount of workouts each week will make you stronger faster than doing very few workouts — and you'll keep getting stronger week after week for the first 9 weeks.

As people increase their resistance training volume, strength improvements tend to plateau faster than muscle size increases, meaning there is a lower training volume at which strength gains stop improving significantly compared to muscle growth.

If you lift weights with either light weights and short breaks, or heavy weights and long breaks—but keep the total work the same—you’ll still build muscle in about 8 weeks. So, there’s more than one way to get stronger and bigger muscles.

In young men who lift weights recreationally, eating more than 2.0 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day led to slightly greater increases in strength over 8 weeks compared to eating less, even though muscle size increased similarly in both groups. This suggests that strength gains may come from improvements in how the nervous system controls muscles or in lifting technique, rather than just from muscle growth.