For young women, doing resistance training with lighter weights for 10 weeks can build leg strength just as well as training with heavier weights, with strength gains around 10-16%.

For young women, doing lighter weightlifting for 10 weeks can build leg muscle just as well as heavier lifting, with muscle growth between 3% and 12%.

For women new to weight training, doing either many lighter reps or fewer heavier reps for 8 weeks gives about the same muscle growth in the thigh muscles, showing both methods work well for beginners.

When women who haven't trained before do weightlifting for 8 weeks, they get much stronger (27-43% stronger) but their muscles don't grow much (only 3-4% bigger), showing that getting stronger happens faster than building bigger muscles at the start.

If young guys who’ve never lifted weights before do regular strength training twice a week for two months using moderate weights, their thigh muscles get bigger and stronger—whether or not they use special bands to restrict blood flow.

If you're a woman who's already been working out, doing 5 to 10 sets of strength training per muscle group each week seems to be enough to build muscle and get stronger over half a year — doing more doesn't seem to help extra.