Your muscles don’t get bigger or smaller right after a single workout, no matter how hard or how many reps you do.

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.

Lifting heavy weights (80% of your max) makes your thigh and arm muscles grow much bigger than lifting light weights (20% of your max) when you do the same total workout over 12 weeks.

Even if you do a lot of leg workouts, your thigh muscles grow about the same amount whether you do 20 or 50 sets a week—just doing any consistent training makes them bigger.

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.

Lifting heavier weights (80% of your max) builds bigger muscles faster than lifting lighter weights (20% of your max) when you do the same total work, with thigh muscles growing about 20% more and arm muscles growing about 25% more after 12 weeks.