Drop Set

The concept is simple: when you can't lift a weight anymore, you remove some load and keep going. This lets you take the muscle past the point where you would normally have stopped, recruiting muscle fibers that a normal set wouldn't have touched. The drop set is also called 'stripping', because you literally strip plates off the bar.

In practice, the drop set works best on isolation exercises and machines, where changing the load is fast. A leg extension drop set: 10 reps at 60 kg to failure, drop to 45 kg and do 8 more reps, drop to 30 kg and do 10 more. All of that counts as a single set. Time under tension and metabolic stress are huge, which is why the technique produces a brutal pump and can contribute to hypertrophy.

Use it with judgment. The drop set generates a lot of fatigue and requires recovery time. Don't put it on every exercise of every session: save this technique for the last exercise of a muscle group or the last set of an accessory exercise. One well-placed drop set is more effective than three random drop sets. And remember: if the starting load isn't high enough to take you near failure, you aren't doing a drop set, you're just lowering the weight.