For decades now, bodybuilders have banked on the “drop set” technique to gain muscle faster. Does this work? Will it work for you?

A drop set involves taking a set of an exercise—usually an isolation exercise—to muscular failure followed by another set of the same exercise to failure with 10-to-20% less weight followed by yet another lighter set to failure followed by still another usually until a certain number of total sets have been performed.

With a drop set, your muscles experience more “time under tension” and “pump” than with a traditional set, and these factors, it’s claimed, can produce a stronger muscle building stimulus.

Skeptics disagree, however, and usually for three reasons:

  1. While time under tension does contribute to muscle growth, research shows that using sufficiently heavy weights (~60% of one-rep max or higher) in your training is more important. That is, if the load isn’t heavy enough, it isn’t likely to stimulate much growth no matter how much time under tension you produce with it.
  2. Drop sets involve progressive reductions in load that become a fraction of your normal training weights, which is suboptimal for muscle building.
  3. For all their glory, muscle pumps aren’t a meaningful contributor to muscle growth—they’re mostly just a pleasing byproduct of resistance training.

Thus, many evidence-based weightlifters dismiss the drop set as a distraction or even detriment. 

Who’s right? 

According to research conducted by scientists at CUNY Lehman College that involved the analysis of five studies on the matter, drop sets appear to produce the same amount of muscle and strength gain as traditional sets.

Notch one for the bodybuilders, then? Not quite. 

The results didn’t find any unique benefits to drop sets, as advocates often claim—only that drop sets are a comparable replacement for traditional sets.

What’s more, because there were only five studies to analyze (a small body of research) and four of the five included fewer than thirty participants (small experiments), and because participants in the studies reviewed trained with loads no heavier than 80% of one-rep max, the scientists weren’t able to investigate how important factors such as training experience, volume, and intensity might affect the results. 

Therefore, while this evidence suggests that drop sets are equally effective as traditional sets for gaining muscle and strength in certain muscle groups, that may not always be the case. It’s possible that, for some people, traditional sets are superior if performed with sufficient weight and intensity.

That said, there are two reasons to consider including drop sets in your regimen:

  1. You like them. Too many people discount their personal preferences in the quest for “optimal” programming and turn their training into something akin to doing their taxes—essential drudgery. This is a mistake. So long as it meets an acceptable threshold of efficacy given your circumstances and goals, “because it’s fun” is just as good of a reason to use a workout split, exercise, technique, etc. as any other.
  2. You’re short on time. And you need to either skip much of your workout or compress, say, 30 minutes of training into 10.

And when incorporating drop sets in your training, use them with isolation exercises rather than compound ones (mostly for safety), and use them for the final set or two of exercises rather than first set or two (unless you only have time for drop sets).

Additionally, here’s my recommended protocol for executing a drop set: 

  1. Take your first set to one rep shy of muscular failure (0 good reps left), immediately reduce the weight by 10-to-20% and do another set to within one rep of muscular failure.
  2. Immediately reduce the weight again by 10-to-20% and do one more set to the brink of failure. 

That “triple set” counts as one drop set. Then, rest 2-to-3 minutes before you do another set (of any kind) for that muscle group.