ROCK GYM

Dropsets and supersets…

I often get asked my opinion on the above and if I ever did them.
The answer is yes I did do both them, but not that often to be honest.

I didn’t feel the need to consistently perform them.
As I showed you before from my earlier back workout from 1988, where I did perform a superset of pullovers, straight into a set of chins, both to failure. This would be a pre-exhaust superset where its lat isolation with the pullovers and then bringing the biceps in with chins in that case. I do remember actually doing this same pre-exhaust superset with Mike Mentzer for back and biceps - but we did pullovers followed by underhand pulldowns.

But like I said, I didn’t do them consistently, my game was to fully focus on the target muscle and give it everything in that one set. If you know in the back of your mind that you’ve got another exercise to follow straight after, it might be off putting to give this first exercise truly everything.

With dropsets, I did them occasionally but only really ever on dumbbell lateral raises as far aside can remember. I got 6-7 reps where I reach failure, the would drop by 20% and squeeze another few reps, usually up to 3-4 reps as it was still heavy.

I didn’t do any of these methods when we filmed Blood & Guts, I stopped doing both completely by then I believe.

I don’t really do them with clients either, the main mission is to go to failure, to true failure and unless we want to go past that for some reason, I don’t prescribe them.