For women who already train with weights, doing more sets per week—up to 38—does not lead to noticeably bigger thigh muscles after 12 weeks compared to doing 22 sets per week.
Mechanism
Synthesis from 1 study
When women who already lift weights do more leg exercises, their muscles don’t get any thicker beyond a certain point because the signals that make muscles grow have already maxed out — doing 30 or 38 sets instead of 22 doesn’t help, as shown in the study with DOI 10.1080/02640414.2025.2459003.
Most probable mechanism
When trained women do more leg exercises, their muscles stop responding to extra stress because the signals that tell muscles to grow have already reached their maximum capacity — doing more sets doesn’t make them grow any thicker, as shown in the study with DOI 10.1080/02640414.2025.2459003.
Chronic resistance training in trained females leads to elevated basal levels of muscle protein synthesis and mTORC1 signaling, reducing the incremental response to additional mechanical load.
Increasing training volume beyond 22 sets per week fails to further activate anabolic signaling pathways or increase ribosomal biogenesis in lateral thigh muscles, limiting new myofibril addition.
Muscle thickness in the lateral thigh reaches a plateau because the rate of myofibrillar protein accretion cannot exceed the maximal capacity of existing cellular machinery, even with increased training stimulus.
Evidence from Studies
Supporting (1)
Community contributions welcome
Does increasing the resistance-training volume lead to greater gains? The effects of weekly set progressions on muscular adaptations in females
Contradicting (0)
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