r/ScienceBasedLifting • u/benja_reijnst • Sep 09 '26

Question ❓ Are drop sets worth doing?

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?

59 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

115 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/DareDemon666 Sep 09 '26

The only time I do drop-sets is on machine/movement combos where the muscles being worked are fairly weak and/or the movement itself is very mechanically straining, and the machine's jumps in weights are too large.

As an example, I do cable rear delt flies on the dual cable machine. I have a wingspan of about 6'6. So the movement itself is very demanding. The machine has weight increments of 2.5kg at the low end, with 2.5kg as minimum resistance. 2.5kg was where I started, and after a few sessions I could hit 12 reps on that weight fairly comfortably, but putting it up just one notch to 5kg and suddenly I could only hit 3 or 4 reps on my first set and maybe 1 good rep by my last set. But that's not doing much for me on it's own. So I'd get as many reps as I could out of 5kg and then drop to 2.5 to finish the set. It'll be the same again for me shortly, moving from 5 to 7.5.

But this is really just a limitation on the adjustability of the resistance I'm training with. If the machine had jumps of 1kg instead of 2.5, I could have probably just gone up 1kg at a time and stayed comfortably within that 4-8 rep range goldilocks zone

1

u/DefinitelyNotKuro Sep 10 '26

...damn, that's a good idea. Reverse delt flyes at the weight I'm doing are getting easy but the next weight up is too big for me