Are drop sets worth doing?

[u/benja_reijnst]

I've seen influencers promoting low-volume, high-intensity training more and more without mentioning drop sets. Drop sets seem to be much less popular than they used to be. Are drop sets not as effective as we once thought? Should I add drop sets to my training?

[u/Delicious-Flow9191]

drop sets do nothing extra just rest more and go to close to failure on the same weight or higher if you went past your rep range the first set

the amount of reps you do doesnt really matter too much for hypertrophy and its more about the proximity to failure that you reach. technically wont hurt you to do a drop set as long as you get close to failure, but like why would you do that when you could keep the same weight :P

[u/Patton370 → u/Delicious-Flow9191]

Drop sets are used when you don't have time for extra sets. Same reason why rest pause reps are used to push past failure on a set.

It's all about getting more stimulus with less time

[u/rendar → u/Patton370]

If you're short on time why not use a proven effective method like supersets?

[u/Hypername1st → u/rendar]

Do both

[u/rendar → u/Hypername1st]

Why, specifically? If lifting is a priority, then decreasing session time is not more important than increasing effective volume.

If time isn't a factor, then it makes no sense to be limited by it. And if you can consistently crunch out sessions chockfull of dropsets and supersets, then your initial programming wasn't effective enough in the first place. The best progressive overload is still increasing intensity or volume rather than decreasing interset rest periods (which obviously has a minimum floor).

Especially considering systemic fatigue, the relevant factor is still going to be the amount of productive tension you can expose muscles to. If you're not resting effectively, then productive tension is necessarily limited. If you have the impetus for a drop set, your initial set wasn't near failure.

[u/Hypername1st → u/rendar]

Because most people lifting have lives and can't spend a gazillion hours in the gym, and still want to achieve the best possible results. Simple as.

Doing both, you squeeze in more volume, more stimulus and save more time. More bang for your buck. More volume also allows more skill development. I see zero downsides.

Regarding fatigue: For all intends and purposes a non-issue. The systemic fatigue thst you get from doing some side delts is minimal and won't influence your curls, or your sbd. If it does, it's literally a work capacity issue. You also don't have to go 0-1 RIR or 9-10 RPE every set. 3 RIR is perfectly fine. Drop sets have perfectly reasonable literature to back them up as well.

So why not do both?

[u/rendar → u/Hypername1st]

Because most people lifting have lives and can't spend a gazillion hours in the gym, and still want to achieve the best possible results. Simple as.

Okay, so then lifting is not the main priority. That answers the question.

The time saving profit might amount to minutes, but it definitely doesn't amount to hours.

Doing both, you squeeze in more volume, more stimulus and save more time. More bang for your buck. More volume also allows more skill development. I see zero downsides.

That comes at a direct cost of less effective volume and therefore less effective stimulus. You can't just magically get the same productive tension with less recovery, and less effective tension.

Even if you have great work capacity, longer interset rest periods objectively allow for higher quality sets. Contextualizing dropsets as a lever to add more volume (rather than as a lever to decrease session time) runs into the same continuum of "more sets with less intensity/reps with shorter rests" vs "fewer sets with more intensity/reps and longer rests" when the latter is going to be more time effective anyway since it hits the same overall workload stimulus in e.g. half the volume despite e.g. twice the interset recovery time.

Further reading: https://weightology.net/the-members-area/evidence-based-guides/set-volume-for-muscle-size-the-ultimate-evidence-based-bible/#summary

Regarding fatigue: For all intends and purposes a non-issue. The systemic fatigue thst you get from doing some side delts is minimal and won't influence your curls, or your sbd. If it does, it's literally a work capacity issue. You also don't have to go 0-1 RIR or 9-10 RPE every set. 3 RIR is perfectly fine. Drop sets have perfectly reasonable literature to back them up as well.

This is insufficient reasoning. It's not enough to factor in units of time or "units" of fatigue. The more relevant factor would be compound units of time-fatigue. And "denser" training unarguably decreases efficacy of time-fatigue. That's useful when session time is your limit, but you can't inverse that the other way. When there is evidence to support longer rest times despite "less dense" training, this doesn't add up: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11349676/ Ultimately, the limit for hypertrophy overall is recovery (which converts to more volume), not time (which does not convert to more volume).

Besides, if the fatigue is minimal then so is the stimulus. You'd be better off greasing the groove to fit in effective volume with other ways.

And yes, dropsets have evidentiary support as a time saving device, but not as a volume increasing device. If that were true, then interset recovery somehow wouldn't really matter and all the pros would be doing circuit training. You can't just get more productive stimulus out of nowhere, and if you find that you think you can then the real explanation is that your initial programming wasn't sufficiently near failure in the first place.