By Stephen Portee, MS, CSCS
When most people say they want to "build muscle," what they're really talking about is hypertrophy: the process of increasing the size of muscle fibers.
Over the years, a specific style of training has dominated gym culture: long sessions, high reps, dozens of sets, and the idea that you need to "hit every muscle from every angle." This approach is everywhere: in bodybuilding programs, fitness influencer routines, and commercial gym culture. The problem is, for most people, it doesn't produce the best results for the time invested.
The fundamental issue with endless sets and reps is fatigue accumulation. Early in a workout, your muscles are capable of contracting hard and producing significant force. As the session continues, fatigue builds and that force production declines.
Beyond a certain point, additional sets contribute what many coaches call junk volume: extra work that adds fatigue without adding much meaningful stimulus for growth. Worse, all that accumulated fatigue extends the recovery time needed before you can train those muscles hard again. You end up spending more time in the gym and needing more recovery, without a proportional increase in the muscle-building stimulus you generated.
Research points to effort and mechanical tension, not sheer volume, as the real drivers of hypertrophy. A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis in Sports Medicine examined training proximity to failure and found no evidence that training all the way to momentary muscular failure is superior to stopping a rep or two short of it. The relationship between how close you train to failure and the muscle growth you get back is non-linear: pushing to absolute failure produced, at best, only trivial additional benefit over training hard but leaving a little in the tank.[1]
In practice, that means you don't need to grind every set into the ground to grow. What you do need is genuine effort against a meaningful load, set after set, without burying yourself in volume that just adds fatigue.
Rather than accumulating volume for its own sake, keep the program focused. Select one or two high-quality exercises per muscle group, a press variation, a row, a squat, a hinge, and invest your effort in those movements with genuine intensity. Progress them through:
If you're not yet comfortable with heavy free weights, machines are an excellent option. They let you push the muscles hard without the stability demands of barbell or dumbbell work, reducing injury risk while still delivering an effective hypertrophic stimulus. It's the same "quality over quantity" thinking we apply to full sessions in How to Structure Your Workouts for Athleticism.
Building muscle isn't about doing more. It's about doing better.
The next time you're in the gym, focus on genuine effort on a small number of well-chosen exercises — not on accumulating as many sets and reps as possible. Train smart, keep your exercise selection focused, and you'll see better results with less wasted time and less unnecessary fatigue.
Stephen Portee, MS, CSCS is the Managing Partner and lead strength and conditioning coach at Apollo Performance Chiropractic & Training in Pleasantville, NY.
