Can a single set actually make your muscles grow? Amy Hudson and Dr. James Fisher tackle a listener’s question: Can you really get results from a single set of exercises for a muscle group? They break down the science behind single versus multiple sets and explain why effort matters more than counting reps. Tune in to discover how to train smarter, save time, and still see real strength gains.

• Amy kicks things off with the big question: can you really do just one set and still get the benefits of strength training? 
• Dr. Fisher’s answer—yes, you absolutely can. That one set, if pushed with real effort, is enough to trigger results.
• Amy highlights a common training misconception. We’ve all been told that “more is better.” But the science shows that one quality set can be just as powerful as three.
• Dr. Fisher breaks down research comparisons of single-set versus multiple-set training.
• According to Dr. Fisher, effort is the key. A single set pushed to a high enough degree of effort matches the benefit of multiple sets. It’s intensity, not quantity, that makes the difference.
• Amy points out the obvious when you train to failure. If your muscles literally cannot do another rep, what’s the point of extra sets? You’ve already achieved the adaptation you came for.
• Dr. Fisher explains why stimulus matters more than volume. It’s the challenge to the muscle that drives change, not the endless repetition. With this approach, you can finish a workout in 20 to 30 minutes.
• Dr. Fisher reframes exercise volume. It’s not just sets of one exercise, it’s total sets across the muscle group. Every compound and isolation move adds to the tally, whether you realize it or not.
• For Amy, working with a personal trainer means you don’t have to guess how much volume is enough. They guide you to push just the right amount in each set, so one set can be enough if done correctly. 
• Dr. Fisher highlights the time trap of traditional training. Add up three sets for every exercise, plus two-minute rests, and you’re suddenly in the gym for two hours. 
• Amy highlights why people get confused about volume. Reps and sets are easy to measure. Effort isn’t—and that’s why so many default to doing “more” instead of doing “enough.”
• Dr. Fisher shares the biggest benefit of working with a certified coach–you hit the right intensity in every session. Instead of mindlessly adding sets, they make sure the effort in each set actually counts toward growth. 
• Dr. Fisher explains how technology is changing the game. With exerbotics machines, effort can be measured in real time. That makes it easier to quantify progress and what actually drives results.
• Dr. Fisher reframes training as a dosage. The right dosage sparks adaptation. More isn’t better—it’s just wasted effort if the goal has already been achieved.
• According to Dr. Fisher, higher volume can sometimes deliver slightly bigger short-term gains. But those differences are small, hard to measure, and fade with time. Over six months to a year, single and multiple sets lead to the same results.
• For Amy, if one set gets you the same outcome in a quarter of the time, why spend hours chasing more? Less time lifting means more time living.
• Dr. Fisher shares a fascinating example from his PhD student’s research. Even elite-level powerlifters—athletes pushing squat, bench, and deadlift—got stronger with a single set once a week. If that works at the highest level, it’s more than enough for the rest of us.

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This is a really intelligent way to train. It’s hard. It’s physically much more demanding.

The workout is a mixture of compound exercises and single joint or single muscle group exercises.

It’s the stimulus that we’re trying to achieve, not the actual total volume of the process in this case.

Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast, where we introduce you to the information, latest research and tools that will enable you to live a strong, healthy life. On this podcast, we will also answer your questions about strength, health, and well -being. I’m Amy Hudson. I own and operate three exercise coach studios. My co -hosts are Brian Sagan, co -founder and CEO of The Exercise Coach, and Dr. James Fisher, leading researcher in evidence -based strength training. And now for today’s episode.

Welcome back to the Strength Changes Everything podcast. Today we are answering a question that has come in. So the question that came in is, Can I really just do a single set of exercise in a muscle group and get the benefits from it? So this episode is talking about the difference between single set and multiple set exercises in muscle groups. People sometimes kind of run across influencers on Instagram or other people who are recommending, you know, three sets of 10 for every exercise you do to get the best benefits. And so we’re going to address this question.

Is it really more beneficial to do a higher volume of exercise or more sets? Dr. Fisher is with me today to break this answer down for us. So, Dr. Fisher, can I really just do a single set of exercise and reap the benefits?

Yeah, you absolutely can. This is a really fascinating question that’s been probably one of the biggest debated topics in the area of strength training for decades, to be honest. And to some extent, I almost feel like this has been put to bed more recently in the last 10, 20 years or so. Um, some of my academic colleagues, when I hear them on a podcast now, often, um, they’ll often get asked things like, Oh, what’s the biggest thing that you’ve changed your mind on or that you’ve learned? And, and the most common answer I hear is, Oh, I used to think that more is better.

And now I understand that you can achieve similar results from just a single set of, of exercise. But obviously that’s not the only answer I’m going to give. I’ll get into some detail about this. And really, when somebody asks about how many sets they should do, they’re actually asking the question of volume, of how much exercise should I do? What should be my volume of training? So we can kind of look at that in a couple of different ways.

Before we get into that, what we should do is we should look at the origin of the three sets of 10. This is the accepted wisdom in strength training. This is what’s been around for a long, long time that people refer back to it. If you’re going to lift weights, you should do three sets of 10, right? That’s what’s accepted. Okay.

So let’s, let’s break this down. So in the early 1940s, captain Thomas DeLorme was in the U S army and he was rehabilitating, uh, injured veterans from the second world war. And he was one of the first people, we should be incredibly grateful to this guy to begin with, because he really invented progressive resistance training in the way that we know it today. The idea that you strengthen a muscle, that you can rehabilitate an injury, a limb or it’s a muscle or it’s a joint, by the use of strength training. And he quite famously sort of said, if you want to get stronger, why would you go and walk around a track and do lots and lots of exercise, low level exercise, when you can simply strengthen a muscle by lifting weights. And what he did is he started all of his, uh, all of his patients by them doing a set of 10 repetitions with about 50 % of the weight that they could lift to 10 repetitions.

So if you can imagine if I, if I can lift a hundred pounds for 10 reps, The first set that these people did with Thomas DeLorme was 50 pounds. They did 50 pounds for 10 reps. And the reason that they did that is because they’re in a state of rehabilitation, they’re injured, they’re recovering. So it’s kind of a warmup set. The next set they did was at 75 % of their 10 rep max. So the next set was at 75 pounds in this example. Okay.

So a first set of 10 reps at 50 pounds, a second set. of 10 reps at 75 pounds. And then the final set was 10 reps at their 10 rep max. So in my case, it would be 10 reps at a hundred pounds with the idea that on the 10th rep or around the 10th rep, I fail, I can’t complete any more repetitions. So I effectively do two warmup sets and then a single set to muscular failure or volitional fatigue or whatever terminals you were comfortable with. But the point being, it’s only one active set.

And in fact, if we get into the literature properly, Thomas DeLong changed his recommendations to be just a single set of exercise. So we then have to ask, why has the three sets of 10 really stuck around as long as it has? And the reality is, I mean, we could hypothesize, you know, any number of ways about why people like to do three sets of 10. But the reality I think is that we’re very, very comfortable with the number three. It’s really important in human society and in numerology as a whole. And I’m not a numerologist, but when I look at society and I look at the

number three, we have things like the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. We have three meals a day. We talk about birth, life, and death. And when we have a story, there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. So the number three just. Repeatedly crops up within our social environment.

Um, the number three is a lucky number in Chinese. It’s symbolic of birth. Um, so there’s various kinds of elements where the number three just seems to have recurred within our life. The probably embeds it as an important number within our, within our kind of society. And it’s that reason that I think we’ve got very comfortable with the idea of three sets of 10. Because without that, why wouldn’t we do two sets of 10 or four sets of eight or five sets of 12?

You know, we’ve just fallen into this routine of three sets of 10, you know, maybe it’s because we can’t count past 10 or we can’t count past three. I don’t know. But really that’s, that seems to be the kind of the general thinking that we should do three sets of 10. Um, and that’s really the origin of it. So when we pause there for a second, we can say, hold on, this is not backed by science. This is backed by kind of dogma and, and, you know, social inclination and, you know, history, but it’s, but we should question it.

We should look at the science and say, okay, so do I need to do three sets of 10 or can I do more or should I do less or what should I do? So a lot of the research has compared single and multiple set training has compared the idea of doing one set of an exercise to doing three sets of an exercise. And for the most part. it’s proven that single sets of an exercise are at least as efficacious as doing multiple sets of the same exercise. So if I go down to the gym now and I do a set of knee extensions and I train to the point where I can’t do any more repetitions, that’s at least as good as if I do that set and then I rest for two minutes and then I repeat and then I rest for two minutes and then I repeat.

But it’s obviously infinitely more time efficient to do that over the long term to do that single set. So the idea is that a single set taken to a high enough degree of effort is at least as efficacious as a multiple sets. And once we start to realize that it’s actually relatively easy to say, hold on, why is that? Why would that be? And we can start to think about the stimulus, not the process. So the process is there.

I’m doing the strength training because I’m trying to stimulate something or the stimulus. is, or I’m trying to stimulate muscle fiber recruitment, motor unit recruitment. So I’m trying to recruit all the muscle fibers within my muscle. And if I train to a high enough degree of effort, if I train to the point where I can’t lift anymore, or I feel like I can’t lift anymore, then that’s recruited all of those muscle fibers. There’s no benefit to re -recruiting them. And in fact, arguably, we’re just overtraining by increasing the stimulus or by increasing the volume of training.

Um, what we should do at that point is allow the body to rest and recover and adapt and then repeat when we’re ready so that we can have that super compensation over time of getting stronger and getting bigger and so forth. Right. I think the difference I want to point out, and it seems obvious when you explain it this way too, is that if you, during your, your initial set, work the muscle to failure or fatigue, we’ve talked about that, where you can’t do any more, then what’s is the need for more sets come in if it cannot do any more, right?

You’ve made it. You’ve achieved the outcome that you’re trying to, to stimulate the adaptations that we’re going for. Yeah, a hundred percent, a hundred percent. And I often laugh about it because, you know, a lot of the clients that we talk about, maybe in their forties or fifties or sixties or older, and they do a single set of exercise and it’s hard work. They understand that it’s hard work. Well, if they go and talk to some 20 year old or some teenager, uh, that’s a gym bro that goes to the gym and does that three sets of 10.

They can kind of jokingly say, Oh, I see you take the easy option where you’d rather be in the gym for two hours, uh, and have a two minute rest between every exercise, uh, or between every set. Then go to the exercise coach, uh, and do a set of exercise that’s hard and then move on to the next exercise and get it done, you know, hard, brief, intense in 30 minutes. So I often kind of laugh that, that, you know, this is a really intelligent way to train. It’s hard, it’s physically much more demanding, but it’s done in 30 minutes or 20 minutes. So, you know, it’s the stimulus that we’re trying to achieve, not the actual total volume of the process in this case. So the other thing that we can think about in terms of volume is that it’s not just about how many sets of a given exercise we do.

We can also think about it in terms of how many sets of total exercise for each muscle group. So for example, if I said we should do three sets of exercise for our triceps, well, if I do a chest press, then that activates my triceps. My triceps are the extensor muscles on the back of my upper arm. If I do an overhead press, that’s the same thing. It’s extending at the elbow, so I’m activating my triceps in that exercise. And if I now do a tricep press down, that’s again

the same muscle. Two of them are multi -joint movements, one of them is a single joint movement. We could look at the same for the lower body. If I do a leg press, that’s my quadriceps and my hamstrings and my glutes. If I do hip abduction, that’s my glutes. If I do a leg curl, that’s my hamstrings.

If I do a knee extension, that’s my quadriceps. So we’re never really thinking about the single set per muscle group, we’re almost always thinking about multiple sets for a muscle group, almost irrespective of whether you take a low volume single set approach or a high volume multiple set approach. And so the reality is that if you add in all of these different exercises that you might do in a workout, and you now extend that or extrapolate that to three sets of each exercise, and then you add in a two minute rest interval between each set, Then you’re going to be in the gym for two hours each session. Uh, and, uh, and the reality is that’s one of the biggest barriers to exercise anyway, that people just don’t have that kind of time to put into exercise. And then as we talk about volume, the other thing that we can think about in this concept is the amount of time the muscle is under tension for. So if we imagine our gym bro goes to the gym and they put a weight on the bar and they lift it for three sets of 10 and they do 10 repetitions.

Well, even if they lift it with relative control at two seconds concentric and two seconds eccentric, then the muscle is under tension for 40 seconds per set. Okay, so that’s a total of 120 seconds that the muscle is under tension for. Well, if you come to the exercise coach, and you do a single set, that single set might be 120 seconds in duration. That’s two minutes that the muscle is actually working that entire time for. And I would almost guarantee that muscle fiber recruitment is higher because you’ve not taken a two minute rest in between each set, which has allowed other muscle fibers and motor units to recover.

So the stimulus is actually greater in that single set than it is in those three sets that equate to the same time under load. And of course we can, you know, we can consider that across a number of different exercises, um, or different tools. So it’s a really interesting concept and it’s a shame that it’s still a debate. It’s a shame that it’s still a question people ask, but it’s understandable because there is so much dogma in this area that people still talk about.

Oh, it’s the amount of exercise is the, it’s how much exercise you do rather than the intensity of effort that you work out. which is the real driving force behind adaptation. Yeah. I wonder if there’s some level to which it’s just harder to quantify somebody’s effort traditionally, you know, it’s easier to quantify reps or time spent than effort sometimes. Um, except with the extra robotics technology where we’re able to quantify that and in real time, every single second you’re working out. But who knows why that is, but I love the point that you made several really bombshell points about.

working and keeping a muscle under load for 120 seconds, either by doing three sets of 10 with a really two -second cadence, keeping that muscle under load with a traditional weight in a gym, but you better stick with that and not cheat with speed or momentum, right? Or doing it at an exercise coach studio where it’s continuous load at a slow pace for 120 seconds, where you’re saying that your argument is that you could even get higher muscle recruitment or motor unit recruitment with that. That’s really great. That’s really great. And the other point that you mentioned too, it’s not about, we’re not, we shouldn’t think about it, this is what you’re saying, I believe, in terms of like one muscle group at a time.

How many reps did this one single muscle group get during my workout? The workout is a mixture of compound exercises and single joint or single muscle group exercises. one muscle group is getting worked in multiple ways during a workout.

It’s not just in a bicep curl. We’re activating that muscle in other exercises that we’re doing that are compound movements. So that’s really helpful to break down. Now, that’s exactly the point. And, you know, people need to think about the stimulus of what they’re trying to achieve rather than how much they do. You know, it was often talked about that strength training is about, you know, it’s a dosage.

Okay, so we take the required dosage. It’s not about, okay, how much can my body handle? It’s about what’s the dosage that’s required to stimulate the adaptation that I want to achieve. And of course, we’ve talked about so many of the physiological and psychological benefits of strength training. And the evidence is very clear that single set training can produce similar adaptations in strength, as well as, of course, the health benefits of cognitive function, myokine release, we’ve talked about recently on the podcast, metabolic function, glucose sensitivity, reduction in body fat, improvements in cholesterol measurements and so on and so forth. Now, interestingly, and it’s worth mentioning because somebody listening to the podcast will undoubtedly raise this question, but interestingly,

the only variable or the only outcome measure that still seems to be supported by a higher volume of training is muscle hypertrophy, so purely muscle size. Now, one of the things around that that I think is still a very contentious issue is that we’re limited by the duration of strict training studies. So if a study is eight weeks or 10 weeks or 12 weeks in duration, then maybe in that short period of time, a higher volume of training might produce slightly greater muscle size increases. But the question that I always ask of the research and of the science is that, first of all, is that really true? Is it really distinguishable? And it’s not always distinguishable.

There’s only a handful of research that supports that. But second of all, how does that level out over time or how does that change over time? a real time course. So if we extrapolate that to six months, the high volume approach doesn’t get you more hypertrophy, you just are more likely to plateau earlier in your muscle size increases, whereas the single set approach doesn’t plateau at the same time point. So it’s very likely that over a longer duration, rather than 8, 10 or 12 weeks, over a six month period or a year period, muscle size increases are identical between a single and multiple set.

uh, strength training approach. It’s just that the high volume approach got there a little bit quicker and the low volume approach got there a little bit slower, but ultimately they get to the same point. And that’s, that’s really the outcome that we’re interested in because if we’re only interested in engaging in strength training for eight weeks, well, we’re missing a trick really, because there’s so much more to be had in our adaptations beyond that eight week timeframe. Right.

I mean, listening to this, it really sort of boils down to, for me, just the point of, if I don’t have to do more, why would I do more in terms of of sets and reps and and volume and the same concept applies with concentrated cardio. I could run for 45 minutes or walk for an hour and a half or I could do a single bout of concentrated cardio at a studio for five minutes or less and get the same metabolic impact. It’s like if I can get the same effect in a quarter or a tenth of the time, a fraction of the time, honestly, why wouldn’t I? I can go live my life and do the other things I want to do with my time. Yeah. Yeah.

100%, 100%. And there’s a large body of research that supports this now. In fact, one of my PhD students a few years back, he completed a few years back actually, Uh, his whole PhD was on what was called minimum effective dose.

And he worked a lot with very, very high level power lifters. So Olympic or national or international competitive power lifters. And one of the things he found in a training intervention with a lot of these athletes was that even a single set of resistance training once per week, uh, was producing strength increases in their squat, bench press, and deadlift, the three core lifts for power lifting. So it’s not just applicable at our lay population level. It’s applicable right across the spectrum to include sort of high level athletes as well.

So it’s a really interesting concept, but certainly it’s something that we’ve got bogged down with where we should have been focused on how hard we’re working rather than how much we’re doing. I love this.

Well, thank you for debunking this and thank you for setting a record straight, Dr. Fisher on this topic.

Um, it’s important to. know kind of fact from fiction when it comes to these kind of recommendations, so thank you so much for bringing the body of research and explaining what really the reality is behind this. Do you have any final closing thoughts on this question for listeners? No, nothing at all. Nothing at all. Excellent.

Well, I hope you go take this information and go work hard for your workout today. If you’re an exercise coach client, go give it your best and experience all these wonderful benefits. Thank you for these questions. Remember, you can submit your questions for the show at strengthchangeseverything . com. You can ask your coaches.

You can ask Dr. Fisher.

You can send your questions into the podcast, and we would love to address them.

So whatever you’re thinking, shoot us that question at strengthchangeseverything . com. We will see you next time on the podcast. Until then, we hope you remember strength changes everything. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with a friend.

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