Take-aways

1. Dropsets can offer the same stimulus for muscle growth and strength while reducing session duration by 30-70%.

   1. If you’re pressed for time, dropsets are a great option, alongside antagonist paired supersets and other techniques.

2. If you’re going to do dropsets, stick to dumbbell/machine work for ease of use.

3. A good way to start using dropsets would be one activation set, followed by 2-4 dropsets where load is reduced by 20% with each dropset (relative from one set to the next).
   

If you’ve been around the gym enough, you’ve probably seen (and perhaps been frustrated by) a fellow gym user take up ~3-6 pairs of dumbbells at once. Dropsets are an alternative set structure wherein you essentially perform one hard set of 5-20 reps, then drop the load by ~20% and immediately perform another hard set. You repeat this 20% drop in load until all your dropsets are performed.

Turns out, though, there might be something to dropsets. Here’s what the data says.

A meta-analysis by Coleman and colleagues summarized the existing data (only 5 studies!) comparing dropsets to traditional sets, where rest intervals lasting a few minutes are taken between each set.

Here’s what they found.

First off, compared to simply doing traditional sets, using dropsets reduced session duration by 30-70%.

There was very little difference for muscle growth whether you used dropsets or straight sets. Interestingly, the same applied to strength, suggesting dropsets are a time efficient alternative to straight sets for both muscle growth and strength.

Why?

There are a few things to stay mindful of with these results. Firstly, there’s only 5 studies on the topic, so estimates of whether dropsets are exactly as effective as traditional sets shouldn’t be taken literally. Secondly, while dropsets led to the same growth as traditional sets, they were likely more fatiguing and very likely more miserable than traditional sets. When you do a drop set, you’re essentially doing one, very long set that is occurring very close to failure. High-rep research indicates that very high-rep sets are pretty uncomfortable. Likewise, failure research generally suggests that training to failure is more fatiguing than staying shy of failure. So, by using dropsets, you may not be able to train with as much volume across the week. Finally, be cautious when interpreting these results. Some of these studies equated volume, some didn’t, which reduces our confidence in the finding that “dropset = normal set” for growth/strength.

In other words, dropsets may be a great tool for fun and for time-saving purposes, but could come at the minor cost of additional fatigue, reducing how much training you can do overall and therefore your growth - after all, you can only recover from so much training in a given week.

As for the reason why dropsets are as effective as traditional sets for muscle growth: it likely has to do with staying close to failure. As we previously reviewed, the reps you do close to failure likely stimulate a bit more muscle growth than the reps far from failure. When you do a dropset, proportionally more of the reps you do after the first set are close to failure. So, even though you’re resting for less than 60 seconds between sets - which has been shown to be worse for growth - this may be made up for by simply spending more time close to failure.

Keep in mind that the above explanations are pretty speculative, but they’re my best guess at this stage!

If you’d like to chat about this study, feel free to comment below.

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