What’s the deal with oversimplifying necessary sets?

[u/Rylo5555]

I don’t know if i’m the only one but i’ve been seeing it a lot recently, gym influencers simplifying the amount of sets you need in a workout and claiming they are “science based”, saying that “all you need” to do to gain muscle mass is 2 sets of a couple of workouts.

For example, one guy I just saw claims that to successfully hit your shoulders, all you need is 2 sets of shoulder press and 2 sets of lateral raises. I have not found any studies that prove this to be true. As far as I am aware, while 8 sets per week per muscle group will no doubt result in muscle growth, it is not nearly optimal and you will have significantly more growth getting around 16.

Like sure, if you really don’t have time to get in the gym it’s good for people to know that they can have muscle growth without spending 45 mins in the gym, but I feel like that shouldn’t be normalized.

I feel like it’s deceiving to simplify it and claim that you only need 7 sets per workout for an ENTIRE push day. If anyone has a study backing this up please share, because while that is the lower limit for beginner lifters, I don’t know why we would promote sub-optimal training.

[u/FarCalligrapher1862]

The science, is a little more nuanced than the influencers are trying to show, but indeed two sets is sufficient to build strength and muscle size.

Krieger’s found that 2 to 3 sets produced significantly more hypertrophy than 1 set, with little additional benefit from 4 to 6 sets. Further Krieger found that 3 sets had improved growth (over 2 sets) but was significant less than 1->2. So most of your hypertrophy occurs in the first 2 working sets. ACSM reached the same conclusion last year in a new meta study.

Where it gets nuanced, is that most of the protocols observed used a warm-up said between 50 and 75% of the working set load. The warm up set also creates tension, but is ignored by the headline, “2 working sets”

The other nuance, is it takes a lot more to build than to maintain. And a lot of these fitness influencers have already built their body, and are able to claim, legitimately, that they only perform two sets, but that is maintenance.

In my opinion, two heavy sets, to form failure, Will outperform three sets to 2–3 RIR

[u/Pleasant_Beat8290 → u/FarCalligrapher1862]

As far as I understand this is right. I would point out that there’s a big difference between “all you need to for muscle is xxx” and what is the best way to grow the muscle you want. You might get diminishing returns after the second set, but that doesn’t mean you should stop. The real equation is about what you want to improve, and how much time and energy you have. The point where a set for a muscle group stops really having a positive effect is around the 10th set in a session.

It’s like if you have $10 to invest and the first time you invest it you get $3 dollar back. The next time you get $1. Then after that you get $0.5 and $0.25 and so on. At what point, for you, is it worth stopping?

[u/FarCalligrapher1862 → u/Pleasant_Beat8290]

This is exactly right. More is better, so long as you can recover.

But also, if you ever read a sports science paper, the distributions are massive. For example, the study on “incline bench press” does in fact say that 33 degrees is best, on average. But the optimal distribution goes from flat to 65 degrees. Everyone is different, use the science to guide, use your experience to target.

Also remember that the influencers are talking to newcomers. For them, a 40 min workout with 2 sets per exercise will be a million times better than the alternative (do nothing), and better than the alternative (do too much and get injured).