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No one goes to the gym in hope of achieving average results-but thats exactly what will happen if you only do straight sets.
You know the drill: Do one set of an exercise, rest, and repeat. Its the formula nearly every guy follows when they're just starting out in the weight room, and its quite literally lifting to failure. If youre trying to maximize muscle growth, focusing exclusively on straight sets will always cause you to come up short.
Straight sets are only so effective because they target only one type of muscle fiber. If you do the typical 6 to 10 reps per set, youre targeting your larger, more powerful type II muscle fibers. If you do 12 or more reps per set, youre focusing on your more endurance-oriented type I fibers, which are smaller than type IIs, but which can still grow and add to overall muscle size. What youre not doing with straight sets is targeting both.
Thats where drop sets come in. Also known as descending sets, strip sets, or simply running the rack, drop sets are a technique in which you perform multiple sets of an exercise to technical failure with successively lighter loads and little to no rest. In so doing, youll not only fatigue both types of muscle fibers, but also increase your training volume and the target muscles time under tension and metabolic stress-all of which can crank up muscle growth.
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Your move: Due to the high-intensity nature of drop sets, only perform them for one or two exercises targeting one or two muscle groups per workout (any more than that can increase your risk of overtraining). Its also a good idea to do them towards the end of a training session. Select a weight that you can only lift 8 to 10 times with perfect form (i.e., to technical failure). Complete the set, and then quickly reduce the weight by 20 to 25 percent and lift to technical failure again, performing as many reps as you can. Repeat a total of three or four times.
The key is to rest as little as possible between sets-only long enough to reduce the weight. Thats why dumbbells and cable machines tend to work best for drop sets; youll waste precious seconds stripping plates off of a barbell, and every second you waste extends your rest, reduces your time under tension and metabolic stress, and ultimately limits your potential gains.