Bodybuilding Forums

I always read that you should lift to failure then give your muscles plenty of time to recover and then lift to failure again (2 or 3 minutes). I understand the lift to failure part but it seems to me that I don't get a hard enough workout when I stop there. I like to do drop down sets or multiple exercize sets (bench straight to fly's). This seems to work the muscle more and seems like a harder workout. If you do, say, drop down bench press routine where you keep dropping ten or twenty pounds(225/205/185/165, etc.) as you reach failure at the higher weight aren't you working the muscle harder than just stopping when you can't do 225 anymore? Also shorter rests times seems like it would work the muscle harder also.

Thanks for your opinions,

Dave

There are two reasons I don't think drop down sets with minimal rest are better than standard 2 minutes of rest with sets at the same weight.

First reason, assuming you do 10 reps of each..
225 lbs. x 4 sets = 9000 lbs. of work
225-205-185-165 drop down sets = 6315 lbs of work

Your muscles are doing less work with the drop down sets. Of course total work is not the only important factor in weightlifting, because you can do a ton more work by lifting light weight with more repetitions, but here you are lifting lighter and not even getting the increased work capacity benefits out of it.

The other reason I don't think they are useful is because you aren't really working the muscle harder with less rest. It's easy to think that, because you feel lots of pain and blood flow to that area, but that pain isn't coming from your muscle fibers being worked harder. That burning pain you feel during an exhaustion exercise like that is just lactic acid build up from burning off your ATP faster than the blood can resupply oxygen to the area. Muscle failure at the end of a set happens not because the muscle fibers themselves have failed, it is because there isn't enough ATP available to fire up the necessary contractions in those fibers to continue lifting that load.

ATP is specifically what you are replenishing when you rest between sets, so if you rest less, you just decrease the amount of available ATP which decreases your muscles' potential workload in that specific set which is why you have to lift lighter. So that is why I don't feel it is an effective strategy compared to resting the 2 minutes and then lifting as heavy as you can lift, as it decreases your ATP and doesn't allow you to lift as heavy as your muscles have the potential to lift.