Increase your intensity with Drop Sets

musclebeauty

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Aug 16, 2018
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I LOVE doing drop sets

Drop Sets. One of the best ways to assure continued growth in you weight training is to vary the stimulation. Getting more intensity out of a set can become difficult.

The use of drop-sets is a long time tried and tested method for increasing intensity and get some deeper muscle stimulation. It works especially well if you don’t have a spotting partner making it hard do get that last one or two reps to failure done.

How does drop sets work?

The technique involves doing your primary set to failure and then doing a set immediately after with half the weight for the same reps as your first set. For example, if you do biceps curls with 15 kgs for 10 reps, you would immediately move on the a set with 7,5 kgs and try and get 10 reps. Expect a serious burn as you stimulate the muscle deeper! You’ll find that in many cases you cannot get to the same reps as your primary set but that’s ok, just try your bets to get there.

Another variation of drop sets is to use triple drops. This is essentially the same thing, but here you are adding in an additional drop set. The example of the biceps curls will then look like this, 15kgs for 10 reps, drop weight to 7,5kgs for 10 reps and another drop to say 4 kgs for 10 reps. Triple drops are especially good at building anaerobic endurance but it does works better on certain muscle groups, one being calves. You can get a serious burn going on your calves using this technique.

Some guys will use the technique slightly differently by dropping weight at different ratios. Lets say for instance you are doing supported rows with 60kgs using three 20kgs plates. Instead of dropping half the weight, you can drop the first set to 40kgs by removing one plate and do as many as possible and then drop another 20kgs to do the third set. It is almost impossible to match the first sets reps doing it this way and the idea is to do as many reps as possible compared to the first set.

Have fun!

 
Love drop sets, especially using the cable stack, starting heavy and going down the stack one weight at a time.

 
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Tried, tested and true training tool to push past failure. Arnold used drop sets a ton back in the day, and we all still love them today.  Shows how things that work stick around!

 
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