If you lift weights until you're really tired, it doesn't matter if you lift slowly or quickly—you'll still build about the same amount of muscle.

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Pro

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Against

Evidence from Studies

Supporting (1)

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Community contributions welcome

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How Slow Should You Go? A Systematic Review With Meta-Analysis of the Effect of Resistance Training Repetition Tempo on Muscle Hypertrophy

Systematic Review With Meta-Analysis

Human

This study found that whether you lift weights slowly or quickly, as long as you push your muscles to near their limit, you end up building about the same amount of muscle. So, speed doesn’t really matter — just going all out does.

Contradicting (1)

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Community contributions welcome

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When duration matters: rethinking resistance training load through time under tension

Editorial/Opinion

The study says how fast you lift and lower weights can change how your muscles respond, so it doesn’t support the idea that all speeds give the same muscle growth when you push to exhaustion.

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

How fast or slow you lift and lower weights doesn’t matter as much for building muscle as how much weight you lift, how many reps you do, or how close you push yourself to failure.

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90%

Lifting weights slowly or quickly between half a second and 8 seconds per rep doesn’t seem to make a difference in how much your muscles grow — as long as you’re doing resistance training.

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86%

Whether you lift weights slowly or quickly, you’ll likely gain about the same amount of muscle—so don’t stress over the speed, just keep lifting.

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85%

Whether you lift weights slowly or quickly, as long as everything else stays the same, you’ll likely build about the same amount of muscle—so how fast you move the weight might not matter much.

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85%

How fast or slow you lift and lower weights probably doesn’t make much difference in how much muscle you build—unless there’s some special situation we haven’t figured out yet.

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85%