Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
Lifting weights that you can only do 10 times, pushing to failure, for 10 weeks makes your thigh muscles bigger and stronger—even if you rest only 20 seconds between sets.
Descriptive
By training both legs of the same person—one with short breaks, one with long breaks—the study made sure differences weren’t due to people being naturally different, making the results more reliable.
If you push yourself to the limit every set, whether you rest 20 seconds or 2 minutes, you’ll end up doing about the same total amount of work.
When people train just one leg with heavy weights, their thigh muscles get bigger and stronger—and this method works well for studying how different rest times affect muscle growth.
If you take only 20 seconds between sets, you can still lift the same total weight as someone taking 2 minutes—you just have to do more sets to make up for the shorter breaks.
If you lift heavy weights with either short or long breaks between sets—while doing the same total work—you’ll get about the same stronger in your leg muscles after 10 weeks.
Correlational
Whether you take short or long breaks between leg exercises, as long as you do the same total number of reps, your inner and outer thigh muscles grow about the same.
When people who’ve never lifted weights before do leg exercises with either 20-second or 2-minute breaks between sets—while doing the same total amount of work—their thigh muscles grow about the same amount.
If you’ve never lifted weights before, you can get stronger by doing either light or heavy weights — as long as you push each set until you can’t do another rep.
Lifting light or heavy weights to exhaustion for 12 weeks didn’t change body fat or muscle mass in women who had never lifted before.
Women who had never lifted weights before got stronger in their arms and legs after doing 12 weeks of lifting light or heavy weights to exhaustion — and both ways made them just as strong.
The increased number of hard repetitions (within 2–3 reps of failure) in drop set protocols compensates for the absence of inter-set rest, resulting in equivalent hypertrophic outcomes compared to traditional training with longer rest intervals.
Assertion
The hypertrophic benefit of longer inter-set rest intervals (>60s) is attenuated or absent in exercises involving smaller muscle groups compared to multi-joint, large-muscle-group movements.
Inter-set rest intervals exceeding 60 seconds promote greater skeletal muscle hypertrophy compared to rest intervals of 60 seconds or less, when training volume and intensity are matched.
Drop set training enhances muscular endurance (repetition capacity at submaximal loads) to a greater extent than traditional resistance training protocols with matched volume.
Comparison
Maximal strength gains (1RM) are greater when training with higher relative loads (>80% 1RM) compared to training with lower loads, even when total volume and proximity to failure are matched.
Drop set protocols involving a single series with multiple sequential load reductions are more time-efficient for inducing muscle hypertrophy than protocols with multiple discrete drop sets or traditional sets.
Drop set training produces equivalent muscle hypertrophy in significantly less training time compared to traditional resistance training, resulting in greater hypertrophy per unit of time.
Quantitative
Doing more reps until you're almost too tired to finish makes your muscles grow just as much with less overall work.
Causal
Drop set training, involving multiple load reductions without rest until momentary failure, produces skeletal muscle hypertrophy equivalent to traditional resistance training with multiple sets.
Performing resistance exercises to momentary muscular failure with maximal concentric velocity and controlled eccentric phase induces skeletal muscle hypertrophy.
Doing one heavy set plus lighter ones without resting takes less time than doing three full sets of heavy or light curls.
You can get stronger, bigger, and more enduring muscles by doing one tough set followed by lighter ones without resting—faster than doing multiple heavy or light sets.
Doing a heavy set followed by lighter ones without resting can help you do more reps with light weights, just like doing only light curls.