In postmenopausal women, doing more resistance training sessions or sets builds more muscle size but does not improve strength, suggesting that muscle growth and strength gains follow different...
Mechanism
Synthesis from 1 study
More sets make muscles bigger because the repeated strain tells them to build more protein, but it doesn't make your brain tell your muscles to contract any harder. That's why you get bigger muscles without getting stronger beyond a certain point.
Most probable mechanism
Doing more sets of strength exercises makes muscle fibers grow larger by keeping them under tension longer, which tells the muscle to build more contractile proteins. But this doesn't make the nervous system send stronger signals to the muscles, so strength doesn't increase beyond a certain point.
Mechanical tension from repeated concentric and eccentric muscle contractions activates mechanosensitive proteins on muscle cell membranes, initiating intracellular signaling cascades
These signals activate the mTORC1 pathway, increasing the cell's capacity to synthesize proteins and promoting ribosomal biogenesis
Elevated rates of myofibrillar protein synthesis lead to net accumulation of actin and myosin filaments within muscle fibers, increasing their cross-sectional area
The cumulative increase in muscle fiber size results in measurable gains in lean tissue mass
Despite increased muscle mass, neural adaptations such as motor unit recruitment, firing rate, and inter-muscle coordination remain unchanged between training volumes
Evidence from Studies
Supporting (1)
Community contributions welcome
Resistance Training Volume Enhances Muscle Hypertrophy, but Not Strength in Postmenopausal Women: A Randomized Controlled Trial
Contradicting (0)
Community contributions welcome
Gold Standard Evidence Needed
According to GRADE and EBM methodology, here is what ideal scientific evidence would look like to definitively prove or disprove this specific claim, ordered from strongest to weakest evidence.