Drop sets have been used by bodybuilders for over 60 years and there’s a reason why; they stimulate massive amounts of muscle growth.
So what is a Drop set? Drop sets are where you perform an exercise to failure and then quickly reduce the weight so as to achieve more repetitions than a standard set.
When completing deadlifts to failure, this pushes your glutes, hamstrings and quads to their limit and in turn breaks down muscle fibres so they can repair and grow bigger. The beauty about using drop sets in your training is that you can continue working the target muscles for longer using lighter weights, which ultimately recruits more muscle fibres to break down and stimulate growth.
As another exercise example, when performing the leg press for a 12 rep set, you may struggle to get the last few reps up, but to achieve a 13th rep, your glutes and quads just aren’t able to. This is known as true failure where you push your body to its absolute limit...or did you? Here is where the drop set comes in, by reducing the weight by around 15-20% and continuing to leg press until another failure point, you’ll be breaking down the glutes and quads further for more gains.
Drop sets can be applied to any body part and used in many different ways including using machines and bodyweight methods to ‘finish off’ the target muscle. Here are our tried and tested, top 5 ways to use drop sets in your workouts:
- Zero rest drop sets
Changing weight between sets is time consuming and allows your muscles to rest. By picking a selection of drop set weights before you start the exercise you’ll be able to pick up the next immediately thus keeping the stress on your muscles.
- Machine drop sets
Machines are awesome when used in conjunction with drop sets. Let’s say you’re performing a bench press and fail at the 10th rep, reduce the weight and fail on the 8th rep, jumping on a chest press machine for the third stage of the set will ensure your pectorals are still being pushed to the limit but without risking using bad form.
- Drop sets with rest pauses
After each failure point, aim to rest for 10 seconds before reducing the poundage instead of immediately picking up the next. You’ll find you can manage a heavier weight when dropping set which will really push your muscles to cope with a very small weight reduction.
- Ascending drop sets
Pick three rep failure points and three different weights for this one. For example, with barbell squats aim to increase the repetitions each time you drop the weight (e.g. 6 reps on 80kg, 8 reps on 60g, 10 reps on 40 kg). A brutal method, don’t be put off if you cannot achieve your desired rep range for the 2nd and 3rd stages - you are simply aiming to ‘fail’ at a higher rep range than the previous stage.
- Final set drop sets / Last exercise drop sets
Performing drop sets for every set in your session can lead to overtraining. This is why it is important to use the method at the right time in each workout. Using a drop set on the 4th and final set of walking lunges for example would be a great way of finishing off the exercise pushing your legs to their limit. Additionally, saving the drop set method for the very last exercise in the workout for all of the sets, would be upping the ante whilst being smart not to over train.
Try adding drop sets at some stage in each of your weekly weights sessions over the next 4 weeks.