“More sets always build more muscle.”
More weekly sets do build more muscle, but each added set brings a smaller gain than the one before.
Adding sets is a reliable way to build more muscle when you are doing only a few, but piling on more and more is not. Past a moderate amount, extra sets give smaller returns and cost time and recovery. A number of hard sets you can keep doing week after week beats a huge program you cannot sustain.
If you do only a few sets per muscle each week, add one or two hard sets for a month and see how you recover before adding more.
Two analyses of 15 and 67 studies agree that more weekly sets build more muscle, but the larger one shows each extra set adds less than the one before, and a 24-week trial found the highest volumes built less. Confidence is moderate because the studies are small, mostly in young men, and differ in how they count sets.
More weekly sets do build more muscle, but each added set brings a smaller gain than the one before. In a 2026 analysis of 67 studies with 2,058 people, muscle growth rose with weekly sets but with clearly shrinking returns.
An earlier analysis of 15 studies found that each extra weekly set was linked to about 0.4 percent more muscle growth, with higher-volume groups gaining about 4 percent more than lower-volume groups. At the top end, more is not always better: in a 24-week trial of 40 trained women, groups doing 5 or 10 sets per muscle grew more muscle than groups doing 15 or 20 sets, at every site measured. A similar trial in 37 trained men found the same trend for muscle, though the difference could have been chance. These are single, small trials, and the larger pooled analyses still found growth rising with more sets, so the point where extra sets stop paying off is not known.
The first few hard sets per muscle each week bring the biggest gains. Adding sets keeps helping for a while, but each one adds less muscle than the last, and in one 24-week trial the groups doing 15 to 20 sets per muscle grew less than those doing 5 to 10.
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- Schoenfeld BJ, Ogborn D, Krieger JW. Dose-response relationship between weekly resistance training volume and increases in muscle mass: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Sports Sciences. 2017;35(11):1073-1082. DOI: 10.1080/02640414.2016.1210197. PMID: 27433992
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- Barbalho M, Coswig VS, Steele J, Fisher JP, Giessing J, Gentil P. Evidence of a Ceiling Effect for Training Volume in Muscle Hypertrophy and Strength in Trained Men - Less is More? International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance. 2020;15(2):268-277. DOI: 10.1123/ijspp.2018-0914. PMID: 31188644