Fadi
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Descending Sets Overload
Word count:700As if descending sets aren’t taxing enough I hear you say; now you want us to overload! How exactly does one overload if one is actually descending or stripping weights off? Let’s take seated d/bell shoulder press for our example here. You pick a weight that you can manage about 10 reps with and you press it 9 times. Then without any rest, you pick two dumbells that are 20% lighter than the first and you go all out until one rep before failure; then for step three, you repeat step two. So let’s say you began your set with 50lb d/bells, for your first drop you'd be doing 40lbs and then again a 10lbs drop to 30 lbs for maximum reps to one short of failure.
Some clarification is in order here: on the first part of the set (in this case the initial 50lbs lift), we’ve established that you stop with one rep still in the tank, (instead of going to failure); on the second part of the set, it will be “form” that will more than likely decide for you to stop; on the last part of the set, (which in this case is done with the 30lb dumbells), it will more than likely be a lactic acid build up that will force you to terminate the set, (rather than the actual weight or the form as was in the two previous cases). As soon as you feel the lactic acid building up and your muscles begin to burn and scream for you to stop, you listen and put the dumbells down. If you say no way Fadi, I’m going to keep going with the lactic acid burning my muscles because that’s the burn and that’s what it’s all about; then to that I’d say go ahead and be my guest. Just don’t expect a quick recovery and 9 times out of 10, expect a quick deflation of that muscle pump you've worked to achieve. That’s right, a quick deflation of all that blood you’ve worked so hard to accumulate in the muscle, will leave as quickly as it took you to force it in. You see once in, you want to trap that blood there. And how would you do that? By doing this:
That’s right, a big fat nothing! Once you stimulate, don’t annihilate! Remember that and tell your friends who like nothing more than to push the envelope further and beyond, when enough is just right.
Now back to the topic. Ok, so where’s the overload in all of this you may be asking? Ah, that will have to wait till you do the same workout again on whenever day you’re training that body part.
In that workout, you pick those same 50lb dumbells and do exactly what you did on the previous workout. So far there’s no overload and you’re not giving your body a reason to grow. We need some overload! The second phase of that set, (that'll be your first drop in weight) is when and where the overload begins. So it's not by going up in weights of course, (since we’re employing a descending set technique), but rather by making our drop set with a lesser percentage from the previous workout, that's what's going to give us our overload, (by choosing a lesser percentage drop, you would automatically have increased the weight from the previous workout: hence the title of this thread). In the previous workout if you remember, we dropped our weight by 20% a set. Now we’ll reduce it by 10% a drop. That equals to going from a 50lbs d/bells to 45lbs and then to 40lbs for our final drop. That as far as the body is concerned, would translate into an overload which demands an additional few grams of muscle for that workout’s effort. You repeat this type of a descending set for two or three times, (depending on the strength of your nervous system and how quickly it will allow you to recover) and then you prepare yourself to having some rocking rock melons on each side.
So next time you want to overload, don’t just think more, think less (to get more)!
Fadi.