Plateau Busting Techniques: Drop Sets and Supersets



Happy first full week in November guys! I hope you're excited for another new week, full of possibilities, and are starting to make plans for what I'm positive will be an exciting upcoming holiday season!

Let's start off this brand new week with a brand new Jtrain Fitness blog post on a topic near and dear to my heart: drop setting and supersetting your workouts to bust through plateaus.

You may or may not be already heavily invested in the bodybuilding game. However, whether you are or you are not, this is an important topic that can be applied to the workouts of the novice lifter, the more experienced lifter, the natural bodybuilder, the unnatural bodybuilder, and many other kinds of people and their realms of fitness.

At some point in your lifting, you may start to notice that you are plateauing in your strength or physique aesthetic. No matter how hard you continue to train, how consistent you are, or how many new exercises you choose, you don't appear to be making any new progress.




A picture of a plateau....because there aren't too many pictures online properly illustrating bodybuilding and plateaus
Source: africa-and-beyond.co.uk

This is the point where, in my opinion, you need to start implementing not so much different exercises as much as techniques that stimulate your muscles with a stress it hasn't been trained to be able to endure and handle. Your muscles are a lot like a student. If they think they can pass your class without doing any of the homework, they will never do the homework. If you aren't constantly testing them with new, more difficult or challenging things, they will have no incentive to grow or prepare themselves to handle a challenge.

That's where drop setting and supersetting come in. Way back when I started getting interested in bodybuilding, I was fortunate enough to start out following someone who stressed the importance of constantly lifting until complete muscle fatigue (failure) and using techniques to further push that exhaustive barrier (mainly through drop sets). I think that constantly fatiguing / stressing / shocking my muscles every day, week in and week out, forced my body to try and build a defense against such intense stress, and thus gave me the results I was after.

So what is a drop set? A drop set is simply performing the same exercise with lighter weight after lifting until failure doing said exercise at your initial heavier weight. Perform the exercise as you normally would, with great form and intensity, until you can't possibly lift the weight any further....even if your mind is screaming for your body to do so. Once you achieve muscle failure, stop doing whichever exercise you're doing with that weight. Immediately drop the weight (choosing a lighter set of dumbbells, or decreasing the weight on a machine) and do the exercise again with that lighter weight, going until failure again. I usually drop the weight by 20-30 pounds, and may actually incorporate MULTIPLE drop sets within one set if I feel like I can keep going, or don't necessarily feel the pump as much as I think I could be. Sometimes I use drop sets for every set for a given exercise, or save them for the last two sets.

Source:menshealth.co.uk

A superset is kind of like a drop set, in that it is performed immediately after you've achieved failure or are done performing an exercise. What makes a superset different however, is that instead of performing the same exercise at lighter weight, you perform a different exercise immediately after. In my opinion, the two exercises should be somewhat related and attack different angles or different parts of whatever muscle you're trying to work out. To me, if you're doing a completely different exercise, you aren't riding the stress you've been exerting on a particular muscle group, and thus don't freak out the muscles as much as they could be. If you attack the muscle group at the same angle with the second exercise, you won't necessarily get optimal stimulation from that exercise (again, in my opinion). From what I've seen, supersets typically are comprised of two exercises, but can incorporate more than two exercises.

Source: afterburneffecttraining.com

Drop sets and supersets are PHENOMENAL tools you can use to help get yourself past a fitness / aesthetic plateu, make gains in strength and ability, as well as grow mass relatively "quick". They work your body out past exhaustion and are a great substitute for a workout partner if one isn't available.

Incorporate these techniques into your bodybuilding / fitness routine today for optimal gains!

-Jtrain

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------*Have a question about natural bodybuilding / fitness / nutrition / stress? Need some advice? Email me at jtrainfitness@gmail.com and I will answer it on this blog! Be sure to enter your email to receive alerts for when the next blog post has come out, and be sure to tell your friends about this blog! Follow me on twitter @jtrainfitness and tell your friends to do the same!*
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