This is your Quick Training Tip, a chance to learn how to work smarter in just a few moments so you can get right to your workout.
No one goes to the gym in hope of achieving average results—but that’s exactly what will happen if you only do “straight sets.”
You know the drill: Do one set of an exercise, rest, and repeat. It’s the formula nearly every guy follows when they're just starting out in the weight room, and it’s quite literally “lifting to failure.” If you’re 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, you’re targeting your larger, more powerful type II muscle fibers. If you do 12 or more reps per set, you’re focusing on your more endurance-oriented type I fibers, which are smaller than type IIs, but which can still grow and add to overall ABS Muscle size. What you’re not doing with straight sets is targeting both.
That’s 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, you’ll not only fatigue both types of muscle fibers, but also increase your training volume and the target muscle’s time under tension and metabolic stress—all of which can crank up muscle growth.