If you lift the same total weight no matter how you arrange your sets—pyramid, failure, or regular—you’ll get the same results. Fancy methods don’t make you stronger or bigger if you’re already trained.

If you’re already strong and trained, you don’t need fancy workout tricks like pyramids or going to failure to get the best results—just do the same total work with any method.

When you lift weights, how much total work you do matters more for getting stronger and bigger than whether you use heavy weights with few reps or light weights with many reps.

When people who already lift weights train with different methods—like starting light and going heavy, or doing sets to failure—all of them get about the same muscle growth if they do the same total amount of work.

The researchers made sure everyone did the exact same total amount of work—same number of reps, same weights—so any differences in results could only be because of how they did the workout, not how much they lifted.

If you don’t push yourself to the absolute limit during weight training, you might actually get stronger faster—because you can do more total lifts overall.