Everyone knows about regular drop sets, which involve performing an exercise until reaching near failure, followed immediately by 2-3 more rounds using lighter weights and cranking out as many reps as possible. The premise is that you’re extending a set and getting more reps in due to the subsequently lighter weights, which is effective as you’re accumulating tons of time under tension, fatiguing the targeted muscle(s) more than otherwise possible with a straight set, and thus stimulating more muscle growth.
However, not as many people are familiar with mechanical drop sets (MDS’s), which I might like even more. The difference? Instead of dropping the weight, you change the exercise(s) – or the angle, in this case – so that the set becomes “easier” as you fatigue the target muscle fibers.
This particular MDS is a doozy, as it hammers the entire upper body and extends time under tension to a painful degree while incorporating the benefits of three different angles. I did 10 reps at each position going from a high incline, to a low incline, to a flat DB bench press, which made each subsequent position “easier” due to the biomechanical advantage of the flatter angles. Of course, none of these are “wasted” reps as the angle changes are offset by the fatigue accumulated over the duration of the set.
The main advantage of MDS’s is that they don’t typically involve using crazy light weights at the tail-end of a set, which is often the case with conventional drop sets. While crazy light weights aren’t a bad thing, this makes mechanical drop sets useful as there’s hardly any junk volume, so to speak. This makes MDS’s a good option when you want to get a lot of “work” done in a shorter block of time, crank the volume up without the use of super heavy loads – an especially good strategy for beat up lifters – and/or build up weak links (or a lagging body part, if aesthetics are your primary goal).
