Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
Even after doing 21 sets of squats, you can still lift the same heavy weight two days later—your muscles bounce back fast.
Correlational
You might feel like you got wrecked after a heavy workout, but your strength and muscle size don’t actually change—your brain is just telling you it was hard.
Even after a brutal leg workout, your muscles don’t get damaged or leak fluid in a way that shows up on ultrasound the next day.
After a really hard leg workout, you feel beat up the next day—but by the day after that, you’re back to feeling normal again.
No matter how many sets you do, your thigh muscles look the same on ultrasound before and up to three days after—so swelling isn’t worse with more work.
Doing more sets means you’re lifting more total weight—simple math, but important for tracking how hard you’re working.
Even after a super hard leg workout, your thighs don’t stay swollen for days—the puffiness goes away by the next day.
Even after doing a lot of squats, guys can still lift about the same amount of weight the next day or two—so one tough workout doesn’t make them weaker right away.
After doing a lot of leg exercises, guys feel less recovered the next day—even if their muscles look fine—because they just feel more tired.
Doing more sets of squats and leg exercises makes people feel like they worked harder, even if their muscles don’t get more swollen or weaker.
We know adding more sets every two weeks worked in this study, but we don’t know if every week or every month would be better.
Descriptive
This study only looked at the front and side of the thigh—so we don’t know if doing more sets helps your front thigh or hamstrings grow more.
Even if you’re already strong—squatting almost twice your body weight—adding more sets will make you stronger, but won’t make your muscles grow more than doing a moderate amount.
No matter how many leg sets people did, their eating habits didn’t change—so differences in muscle growth or strength weren’t because of diet.
Doing a ton of leg workouts takes way longer—about twice as long—which might make people quit because they don’t have enough time.
People who did more sets didn’t lift heavier weights—they just did more reps and sets. The weight stayed the same, but the total work went up.
Quantitative
Even doing a huge number of leg sets—over 50 a week—didn’t make anyone’s muscles shrink, which means there might be a very high limit to how much training your muscles can handle without losing size.
Even though the guys doing the most workouts looked like they might have grown a little more, the difference wasn’t big enough to say for sure that more sets = more muscle.
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.
Causal
Doing a lot more leg workouts—over 50 sets a week—doesn’t make your thigh muscles grow bigger than doing 20–40 sets a week, even if you train for 12 weeks.
If you slowly add more sets to your leg workouts every two weeks, you’ll get stronger in the squat than if you keep doing the same number of sets the whole time.
Taking strong cholesterol drugs to get LDL very low doesn’t make you more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than taking standard doses.
Even when cholesterol is driven down to very low levels, it doesn’t raise the chance of bleeding in the brain — at least not in the first few years of treatment.
People who take strong cholesterol-lowering drugs to get their LDL very low don’t stop taking them more often because of side effects than those on regular doses.