HYPERTROPHY TIME - DROP SETS

HYPERTROPHY TIME - DROP SETS

 

Today's post is about muscle hypertrophy (growing the muscles). We've all heard that in order to make your muscles grow, you need to work with weights in order to cause "injury" to your muscles through lifting the weight, and stimulating their growth. The reason they grow when you deliberately injure them when working out, is that the body recognizes that the amount of muscle it possesses is insufficient, and that is why it got injured. Therefore, it develops the muscles so that it prevents injury (little does it know that you are going to injure them again in your next workout, hehe). Consequently, it is expected that at some point it will stop growing, sine the stimulus (the weights) won't be enough to destroy the muscle fiber. So what do you do in that case? Simply, you change the training protocol and you add different techniques. One of them is drop sets, which we are going to talk about today.

Drop sets (as stated by the name) are a type of training in which you drop the amount of weight you lift after you have reached failure (the point where you cannot life the weight anymore). When you perform a certain exercise, you reach a point after which it is impossible to move the weights again. This is called failure. It means that you have injured your muscles as much as you could with the specific weight. Notice the word "specific". your muscles are indeed injured, but only with the SPECIFIC weight. If you drop the weight by about 30% and keep going with as little rest as possible, you will still be able to move the weight for some more repetitions. That way you will destroy more muscle fiber and therefore help your muscles grow a lot more. 

Drop sets are a technique that can have many variations. Today I'll share some of them and I will make another post with my upper body workout where I use this technique in some of its variations.

1) Regular drop sets: You choose a weight with which you will reach failure within 8-12 reps. After you finish your first set of reps, you strip some weight (be it a plate, or the next smaller dumbbell) and you immediately (or with as little rest as possible) repeat the exercise until failure. That is considered one drop set. 

2) Double drop sets: As their name says, you drop the weight twice. This means that you reach failure, you drop the weight once, you reach failure again, you drop the weight one more time, and you reach failure. This is a technique I like to use as a finisher in 1-2 of my exercises when I do drop sets. You'll see what I mean in the follow-up video.

3) Super drop-sets: This can be done in two ways. You pick two exercises which you are going to perform back to back (say bicep curls, and skullcrushers with dumbbells). a) You fail at the first exercise and you do the second with no rest. You reduce the weight of the first exercise and jump right back into it. You reduce the weight of the second exercise and you do it right away. Or b) You perform the first exercise, drop the weight and do it again, and then immediately do the second one, then reduce the weight and do it again. 

It goes without saying that even in this case you can do a double drop set.

4) Run the rack: This is mostly done with cables or dumbbells. You reach failure within the desired range, you move on to the immediately smaller dumbbell, and you go on without rest until you reach the smallest weight which can be challenging within the rep range you have set. (E.g., if you reach the 1kg dumbbells and you can do 30 reps with them, it is of no use). The same can be done with cables, with which you remove one plate and go on with your drop set.

5) Ascending reps: In this case, you reduce the weight more than 30%, so that you can perform more reps than in your first try. Let's say that you do bench presses, and you have failed at 10 reps. If you reduce the weight as much as you normally do in your drop sets, you will probably fail at 8-10 reps. With ascending reps, you will reduce the weight more than you normally do, so that you reach failure at say 10-12 reps (more or at least the same number of reps as in your first try).

So there you have it. The next time you hit a plateau, change your training regime buy incorporating drop sets. It is a technique I currently use since I have hit a plateau of 96,5 kg, and I want to develop my muscles even further (I am a mesomorph with ectomorph features, therefore this weight is not that observable on me, and I have been stuck there for a month, no matter how much I eat). 

Stay tuned!!