How to Use Mechanical Drop Sets to Squeeze Even More Gains Out of Your Workouts
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.
When you’re just starting out, relying on “3 sets of 10” for most exercises will add muscle to your frame. But as your strength improves and your goals grow larger, so too must your arsenal of lifting techniques. Moving beyond straight sets and integrating supersets, trisets, monster sets, pyramid sets, and other advanced set-and-rep schemes into your training program will help you vary your routine, boost time under tension, increase training volume, and bust exercise monotony. The payoff: greater consistency and stronger, more muscular results.
If you want to maximize that payoff, however, there’s one more technique that you should add to your repertoire. This muscle-building method flies under most trainees' radars, but is a favorite of many top bodybuilders and strength athletes: mechanical drop sets.
What Is a Mechanical Drop Set?
You’re likely familiar with traditional drop sets, in which you perform back-to-back sets of the same exercise with successively lighter loads to reach a more comprehensive level of muscle fatigue (and adaptation stimulus). Mechanical drop sets achieve the same end by different means.
Instead of reducing your load from set to set (i.e., “running the rack”), you increase your mechanical advantage by altering your grip type (e.g., overhand to underhand), grip position (e.g., wide to narrow), foot position (e.g., staggered to parallel), range of motion, or even the exercise itself (e.g., pullup to chinup). In short, with mechanical drop sets, the weight stays the same, but the exercise changes as you fatigue to make the work “easier.”
Don’t confuse “easier” with “less challenging,” though; since the target muscle is becoming increasingly fatigued, each set should still be tough to complete. But the big advantage of mechanical drop sets is that they allow you to do more work with a heavier load—and when executed correctly, that equals greater gains.
How to Do Mechanical Drop Sets
The classic example of a mechanical drop set is the skull crusher to close grip bench press. After isolating the triceps with the skull crusher, you transition to a pushing exercise that keeps the hands narrow to emphasize the triceps while also recruiting the pecs to help you bang out more reps.
This cable fly mechanical drop set is another excellent option. Instead of changing the exercise, you alter the movement angle, helping you keep the target muscle (your pecs) under constant tension for a longer period of time. But no matter what your exercise progression is, there are a few keys to executing it correctly.
●Don’t change the load or target muscle from set to set.
●Do change the exercise to make it “easier” using the suggestions above.
●Select a weight that challenges you to complete about 8 to 10 reps of each set. You don’t need to reach technical failure (i.e., the point where you can’t perform another rep with perfect form) every time, but you should come close.
Like traditional drop sets, mechanical drop sets are incredibly taxing, so only do them once or twice per workout, targeting just one or two muscle groups. They also tend to work best when performed at the end of a lifting session (e.g., as a finisher). But perhaps the greatest similarity between the two lifting strategies is how fast you’ll notice results—which is why both deserve a place in your program.
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