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quantitative
Analysis v1
Strong Opposition

Doing more sets at the gym than you're used to—like going from 18 to 33 sets a week per muscle group—doesn’t make your muscles grow significantly more, even though you might see a little more growth overall.

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Pro
48
Against

Evidence from Studies

Supporting (1)

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Community contributions welcome

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Evidence of a Ceiling Effect for Training Volume in Muscle Hypertrophy and Strength in Trained Men - Less is More?

Randomized Controlled Trial
Human
2020 Feb 1

The study found that doing more sets didn’t make muscles grow much more after a certain point — even people doing the most sets didn’t get significantly bigger than those doing fewer sets, so going way overboard probably doesn’t help.

Contradicting (2)

48

Community contributions welcome

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Higher resistance training volume offsets muscle hypertrophy non-responsiveness in older individuals.

Randomized Controlled Trial
Human
2024 Feb 1

The study found that doing more sets (4 instead of 1) helped older people build more muscle, especially if they didn’t respond to low volume. The claim says doing way more sets (like 33 instead of 18) doesn’t help — but this study shows more sets do help, so it disagrees with the claim.

33

Higher volume resistance training enhances whole-body muscle hypertrophy in postmenopausal and older females: A secondary analysis of systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials.

Systematic Review With Meta-Analysis
Human
2024 Sep

This study found that older women who did more weight training gained more muscle, but it didn’t look at the exact same amount of training or measure muscle the same way as the claim, so we can’t say if the claim is right or wrong.

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.

Similar Assertions

If you lift weights, your muscles grow bigger — but only up to about 45 sets a week per muscle group; after that, you don’t get much extra growth no matter how much more you train.

48
0
83%

Total training volume, training intensity, and consistency are more significant determinants of muscle hypertrophy than the specific muscle length at which training occurs.

45
0
82%

Adding just one or two extra sets of exercise per week probably won’t make your muscles grow any more, because everyone’s body reacts differently and it’s hard to measure tiny changes accurately.

0
48
82%

The total amount of work done (weight × reps × sets) seems to matter for muscle growth — more work generally leads to more muscle, even if the weights are light.

20
0
80%

If you're a young man who already trains regularly, doing more sets with lighter weights for 6 weeks can make your thigh muscle grow a little bigger — but doing fewer sets with heavier weights won't make it grow at all.

46
0
79%

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