Do You Really Need More Exercises to Build More Muscle?

Walk into almost any gym and you'll see two very different approaches to building muscle.

One person does a few basic exercises, trains them hard, gradually gets stronger, and sticks with those movements for months. Another person changes exercises constantly, adds more sets whenever progress slows, and seems convinced that every possible angle of a muscle needs its own exercise.

The second approach certainly looks more sophisticated.

But does more variety and more training volume actually produce more muscle growth?

A new 2026 study published in Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport tested exactly that. Researchers had young men and women complete a 14-week resistance-training program and compared what happened when they increased training volume, regularly changed exercises, combined both strategies, or simply continued doing the same basic program.

The result was surprisingly simple.

All four approaches increased upper-limb lean tissue mass, but doing more sets, changing exercises, or combining the two did not produce significantly greater gains than simply continuing the original training program.

That doesn't mean training volume and exercise selection don't matter. They absolutely can.

What this study suggests is that once you're already doing a reasonable amount of hard, productive training, making your program more complicated doesn't automatically make it better.

TLDR: More Exercises and More Sets Didn't Build More Muscle

This was a relatively small study involving novice lifters, so I wouldn't use it to declare that exercise variety or higher training volumes are useless. However, the results provide a good reminder that there may be diminishing returns once you're already training with sufficient volume and effort.

• 32 young adults, including 17 women, completed the full 14-week resistance-training study.
• Everyone completed the same standardized resistance-training program for the first six weeks.
• During the following eight weeks, one arm continued the original program while the other performed higher volume, greater exercise variation, or both.
• Upper-limb lean tissue increased by approximately 4% during the initial six weeks of training.
• During the second phase, lean tissue increased another 3.1% in the control condition, 2.2% with higher volume, 3.0% with exercise variation, and 3.2% with higher volume plus exercise variation.
• There were no statistically significant differences in muscle growth between the four approaches.
• The higher-volume groups performed substantially more work, but that additional volume did not translate into measurably greater whole-arm lean tissue.
• Participants trained in the 8 to 12 repetition range and performed sets to concentric failure, meaning effort was high.
• Individual responses varied substantially, suggesting that some people may respond differently to changes in training volume or exercise selection.
• The practical takeaway is pretty straightforward: a well-designed program with adequate volume and consistent effort may be enough to build muscle without constantly adding exercises and sets.

 

Why Do We Keep Adding More Exercises?

There's a logical argument for exercise variety.

Different exercises place muscles in different positions and change joint angles, muscle lengths, activation patterns, and where mechanical strain occurs within a muscle. Because hypertrophy doesn't necessarily occur uniformly throughout an entire muscle, using several exercises could theoretically stimulate growth in different regions.

Take the biceps as a simple example.

A preacher curl, incline curl, and standing barbell curl all train elbow flexion, but they don't challenge the biceps in exactly the same way. Shoulder position changes muscle length and potentially changes where the greatest training stimulus occurs.

Training volume has an equally reasonable argument behind it. Previous research has generally found a dose-response relationship between weekly training volume and muscle hypertrophy, meaning additional productive sets can produce additional muscle growth.

Put those ideas together and the strategy seems obvious.

Do more sets and use more exercises.

The researchers conducting this study actually expected that strategy to work. They hypothesized that increasing volume or exercise variety would improve muscle growth, with the combination of higher volume and greater exercise variety producing the greatest hypertrophy.

It didn't.

How the Researchers Tested It

The study included young men and women who had not participated in a resistance-training program for at least 12 months and had no more than one year of previous resistance-training experience. Thirty-two participants completed the entire study, including 17 women.

The experiment lasted 14 weeks and was divided into two phases.

For the first six weeks, everyone followed the same upper-body resistance-training program twice per week. Participants performed bench presses and lat pulldowns for three sets of 8 to 12 repetitions, along with barbell curls and triceps pushdowns for four sets of 8 to 12 repetitions.

This initial phase was important because the researchers wanted everyone entering the experimental portion of the study with a similar recent training background.

After those six weeks, things got more interesting.

They Actually Trained Each Arm Differently

During the final eight weeks, researchers used a clever within-person design.

One arm continued performing the original training program and served as the control condition. The other arm was randomly assigned to one of three different approaches: higher training volume, exercise variation, or higher volume combined with exercise variation.

That allowed researchers to compare different training strategies within the same person rather than simply comparing one group of people with another.

The higher-volume condition continued using the same exercises but increased from four to six sets for the targeted biceps and triceps exercises.

The exercise-variation condition kept volume at four sets but distributed those sets between two exercises, with one exercise changed weekly. For the biceps, the exercise options included barbell curls, preacher curls, and incline curls. Triceps exercises included skull crushers, French presses, and triceps kickbacks.

The final condition combined both approaches by performing six total sets using two different exercises, with one exercise changing each week.

The diagram on page 5 of the paper makes the differences particularly clear. The control arm kept doing the same basic exercises, while the experimental arm either accumulated more sets, rotated movements, or did both.

If more volume and more variety were going to produce noticeably more muscle growth, this setup gave them a reasonable opportunity to show it.

Everyone Was Training Pretty Damn Hard

This detail matters.

Participants weren't casually completing a few sets and stopping whenever things became uncomfortable.

Every protocol used an 8 to 12 repetition maximum range, and participants were instructed to perform their sets to concentric failure. In other words, they continued until they couldn't complete another repetition through the full range of motion.

Loads were adjusted throughout the study. If someone could perform more than 12 repetitions, weight was increased. If they couldn't reach eight repetitions, weight was reduced.

That means the control program wasn't necessarily an easy or inadequate program that desperately needed more volume.

Participants were already doing a reasonable number of hard sets.

That becomes pretty important when we look at what happened next.

The First Six Weeks Worked Really Well

Before researchers changed anything, participants completed six weeks of the same standardized resistance-training program.

Upper-limb lean tissue mass increased by approximately 4% during those first six weeks.

That's worth emphasizing because the original program was clearly producing measurable changes.

The researchers then essentially asked: Now that this program is working, can we make it work even better by adding more sets, changing exercises, or doing both?

The answer, at least over the next eight weeks, was not measurably.

More Volume Didn't Build More Muscle

During the second phase, the control condition continued the original program and increased upper-limb lean tissue mass by approximately 3.1%.

The higher-volume condition increased by approximately 2.2%.

That's not a typo.

The participants doing more training did not experience greater average increases in upper-limb lean tissue than the participants continuing with the original amount of training. The difference between conditions was not statistically significant.

That doesn't mean 2.2% is truly worse than 3.1%. The study was small, individual responses varied, and the measurement method wasn't precise enough to confidently distinguish relatively small differences.

But it certainly doesn't support the assumption that more sets automatically equal more growth.

The researchers estimated that participants were already accumulating approximately 11 to 15 weekly sets for the biceps and triceps when compound exercises such as bench presses and pulldowns were partially counted toward those muscles. That amount was already within commonly recommended ranges for hypertrophy.

Once participants were doing enough productive training, simply piling on additional sets may not have provided much additional benefit.

Exercise Variety Didn't Help Either

The exercise-variation condition produced approximately a 3.0% increase in upper-limb lean tissue mass.

The control condition produced approximately 3.1%.

Basically identical.

This happened even though the exercise-variation group regularly rotated between movements that placed the biceps and triceps at different muscle lengths and joint positions.

That doesn't necessarily mean exercise selection is irrelevant.

Different exercises can produce different patterns of regional hypertrophy, meaning one movement might stimulate slightly more growth in one portion of a muscle while another movement emphasizes a different region.

The problem is that this study measured whole-arm lean tissue mass using DEXA. That method may not be sensitive enough to detect small differences in growth within specific regions of individual muscles. The researchers explicitly caution against interpreting their results as evidence that exercise variation has no effect on regional muscle development.

That's an important distinction.

Exercise variation didn't produce more total upper-limb lean tissue in this study. That doesn't prove every exercise produces identical muscular adaptations.

Surely More Volume Plus More Variety Worked Better?

Nope.

This was actually the condition the researchers expected to perform best.

Participants increased their training volume and used multiple exercises, changing one of those exercises weekly.

Upper-limb lean tissue increased by approximately 3.2%.

Compare that with:

3.1% for control.

2.2% for higher volume.

3.0% for exercise variation.

3.2% for higher volume plus variation.

There were no statistically significant differences between any of the conditions.

The most complicated program didn't meaningfully outperform the simplest one.

There is something beautifully annoying about that.

The Graphs Make This Even More Interesting

Figure 6 on page 7 shows average upper-limb lean tissue mass before and after the second training phase. All four conditions move upward, but the groups remain remarkably similar.

Figure 7 is arguably even more useful because it shows what happened within individual participants.

Some people grew more with higher volume.

Some grew more with the control protocol.

Some responded better to exercise variation.

Others didn't.

There was no consistent pattern showing that one strategy reliably produced better results.

Researchers classified someone as a "responder" if upper-limb lean tissue increased by more than 3%, which was based on twice the typical measurement error.

Again, there were no significant differences in the proportion of responders between the different training strategies.

That's a useful reminder that exercise science gives us averages, while actual humans frequently refuse to behave like averages.

Individual Responses Were All Over the Place

The amount of individual variation in this study was pretty remarkable.

During the first six weeks, when everyone performed exactly the same training program, changes in upper-limb lean tissue ranged from approximately negative 1% to positive 15%.

During the second phase, individual changes ranged from approximately negative 1% to positive 10% in the control condition, negative 1% to positive 7% with higher volume, positive 1% to positive 8% with exercise variation, and negative 1% to positive 10% when volume and variation were combined.

Think about that for a second.

Everyone can follow essentially the same program and get dramatically different results.

That's one reason I get skeptical whenever someone claims they have discovered the exact perfect number of weekly sets or the exact perfect collection of exercises for everyone.

Training principles matter, but individual response matters too.

Some people may genuinely benefit from additional volume. Others may simply accumulate more fatigue without getting noticeably better results.

The researchers found examples of both.

Does This Mean Training Volume Doesn't Matter?

Absolutely not.

There is a much larger body of research showing a relationship between training volume and hypertrophy, and the authors acknowledge that directly.

The important question is probably not:

"Does volume matter?"

It does.

A better question is:

"When does adding more volume stop providing enough additional benefit to justify the extra work?"

In this study, the difference was relatively modest. Participants went from approximately eight to 12 weekly direct sets per muscle group during the manipulated portion of the program.

Based on previous meta-analytic estimates, the researchers calculated that four additional weekly sets might be expected to produce only about 0.8% to 1.0% additional hypertrophy.

That's not a huge difference.

It was also close to the measurement variability of their DEXA scans, which had a coefficient of variation of approximately 1.5%.

So there may have been a small advantage that this particular experiment simply couldn't detect.

No statistically significant difference does not necessarily mean the programs were physiologically identical.

More Isn't Always Better

There's another side of training volume that doesn't always get enough attention.

Sets aren't free.

Every additional set costs time and creates some degree of fatigue. As training volume climbs, recovery demands increase as well.

If six additional sets produce substantially more muscle growth than four, the extra work is probably worth doing.

If 12 sets produce virtually the same result as eight, the equation becomes different.

This study can't tell us exactly where that point occurs, but it supports the idea of diminishing returns.

Early productive sets may provide a large hypertrophic stimulus. Additional sets may still contribute, but eventually each additional set provides less benefit.

At some point, you're doing a lot more work for very little additional return.

The goal isn't to do as much training as you can survive. It's to do enough productive training to create the adaptation you want.

Exercise Variation Still Has a Place

I also wouldn't use this study as an excuse to perform exactly the same four exercises for the rest of your life.

Exercise variation can still be useful.

Different movements can train muscles at different lengths and emphasize different regions. Exercise selection can also be changed when a particular movement causes discomfort, when equipment isn't available, when someone wants to develop a specific weak point, or simply when variety improves enjoyment and adherence.

The study authors also point out that exercise variation may be more relevant in experienced lifters than in people who have only recently started training.

What this study challenges is the idea that exercises need to be changed constantly just to keep the muscles "confused."

Muscles don't get bored.

If you're progressively challenging a muscle with sufficient effort and appropriate volume, you don't need to invent a new exercise every Tuesday to trick it into growing.

There May Actually Be an Advantage to Keeping Exercises Consistent

This wasn't directly tested in the study, so I want to separate this from the researchers' findings.

But from a practical training perspective, keeping exercises consistent for a reasonable period makes progression much easier to evaluate.

If you performed an incline dumbbell press with 60-pound dumbbells for eight repetitions six weeks ago and you're now using 70-pound dumbbells for 10 controlled repetitions, you have a pretty clear indication that you've improved your performance.

If you've changed your chest exercises every week, comparing performance becomes much more difficult.

Consistency also gives you time to improve technique and become more efficient at performing a movement.

That doesn't mean exercises can never change.

It means exercise variation should probably have a reason beyond simply creating novelty.

Effort May Matter More Than Novelty

One of the most practical details in this study is that participants were instructed to perform sets to concentric failure.

That creates an important context for the results.

The control group wasn't doing four lazy sets while the experimental groups did more productive training. Everyone was training hard.

The researchers ultimately concluded that when resistance-training volume is already within recommended levels and sets are performed with high effort, further increases in volume or exercise variation may not produce additional increases in whole-arm lean tissue during the early stages of training.

That might be the most useful sentence in the entire paper.

People spend enormous amounts of time worrying about exercise selection, weekly splits, set counts, rep ranges, and advanced programming techniques.

Meanwhile, a much simpler question often gets overlooked:

Are the sets you're already doing actually hard enough to create an adaptation?

Adding three exercises doesn't necessarily fix three poorly performed exercises.

Beginners Probably Need Less Complexity Than They Think

This study involved relatively inexperienced lifters, and that limitation actually makes the practical takeaway particularly useful for beginners.

When you're new to resistance training, almost everything is a novel stimulus.

You don't need six different curl variations to convince your biceps to grow.

You need to learn how to perform a few effective exercises well, progressively challenge those movements, train with sufficient effort, recover, and repeat the process consistently.

The authors' practical recommendation was very similar. For novice lifters already training within evidence-based volume ranges, a structured resistance-training program with adequate volume and consistent effort may be sufficient to increase upper-limb lean tissue without frequently increasing volume or changing exercises.

That's considerably less exciting than a new workout every four weeks.

It's also considerably easier to follow.

Don't Confuse Complexity With Effectiveness

Fitness has always had a complexity problem.

Basic training principles don't change very often, which makes them difficult to continually repackage and sell.

Progressively train your muscles.

Use enough volume.

Train hard.

Recover.

Eat enough protein and calories to support your goals.

Repeat for years.

That's effective, but it's not particularly sexy.

So we get endless new exercise variations, advanced intensity techniques, "muscle confusion," specialized splits, and programs that look like someone designed them specifically to prevent you from remembering what you did last week.

A complicated program can absolutely work. It just isn't automatically better because it's complicated.

This study is another reminder of that.

What This Study Doesn't Tell Us

There are several important limitations that keep these findings from becoming a universal rule.

First, only 32 participants completed the study, making this a relatively small experiment.

Second, the participants were untrained or relatively inexperienced. We can't assume an advanced bodybuilder with ten years of training would respond the same way.

Third, the researchers measured whole-arm lean tissue using DEXA rather than MRI or ultrasound. DEXA cannot precisely measure individual muscles or regional hypertrophy, meaning small differences between exercise selections could have gone undetected.

Fourth, there was no non-training control group, which limits the researchers' ability to completely separate training-related changes from natural variability or other lifestyle factors.

Finally, the difference in training volume was relatively small. The higher-volume conditions performed four additional weekly direct sets per muscle group, and the researchers acknowledge that any expected additional hypertrophy may have been too small for their measurement method to reliably detect.

So the conclusion isn't:

More volume never works.

And it isn't:

Exercise variety is useless.

The evidence doesn't support either statement.

The Bottom Line

This study tested a question that comes up constantly in strength training: If your current program is already working, can you accelerate muscle growth by doing more sets, changing exercises more frequently, or doing both?

In these novice lifters, the answer was no.

After the initial six weeks of standardized training increased upper-limb lean tissue by approximately 4%, participants spent another eight weeks following one of four approaches.

The control condition gained approximately 3.1%.

Higher volume gained 2.2%.

Exercise variation gained 3.0%.

Higher volume plus exercise variation gained 3.2%.

There were no significant differences between them.

That doesn't mean training volume or exercise selection doesn't matter. It means that once you're already doing enough hard, productive work, simply doing more or making your program more complicated may not produce noticeably better results.

If you're relatively new to lifting, you probably don't need 17 exercises, a new program every month, or a spreadsheet that requires an engineering degree to understand.

Pick effective exercises.

Do enough hard sets.

Progress them over time.

Recover.

Then give the program enough time to actually work before deciding you need to change everything.

Building muscle is complicated biology. Your workout doesn't have to be.

Reference:

Valério DF, Moriggi Júnior R, Damas F, Barroso R. Changes in Upper-Limb Lean Tissue Mass in the Early Stages of Resistance Training: The Role of Volume Progression and Exercise Variation in Young Women and Men. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport. Published online April 15, 2026. doi:10.1080/02701367.2026.2652354.