Ramping Sets Up Vs. Ramping Sets Down

[George Christiansen]

Just curious what criteria you guys generally use to decide who will respond better to ramping work sets up to the heaviest versus hitting the heaviest set and then dropping the weights?

[Matt Reynolds]

Just curious what criteria you guys generally use to decide who will respond better to ramping work sets up to the heaviest versus hitting the heaviest set and then dropping the weights?

Novices and early intermediates will almost always work up to their heaviest sets across. Hitting a heavy set and then dropping down for additional work is a late-intermediate to advanced technique to get more volume in and because extremely heavy sets take much more out of an advanced lifter than it does a novice.

[George Christiansen]

I understand that criteria.

I was asking why one chooses one or the other once it has been established that the trainee only needs or can handle on top set. Why ramping up vs back sets?

You could get the same tonnage either way. I am just curious if it is just a matter of preference whether or not to try and get it one way or the other.

I tend to think that your top lift would suffer from ramping up, but maybe some people require some truly heavy sets to get "primed" for a top set?

[Matt Reynolds]

I understand that criteria.

I was asking why one chooses one or the other once it has been established that the trainee only needs or can handle on top set. Why ramping up vs back sets?

You could get the same tonnage either way. I am just curious if it is just a matter of preference whether or not to try and get it one way or the other.

I tend to think that your top lift would suffer from ramping up, but maybe some people require some truly heavy sets to get "primed" for a top set?

Correct - for advanced liters their top set would suffer if too much volume is done beforehand. After the heaviest set, then the volume is just contributing to tonnage/ volume/ hypertrophy/ etc and giving us enough of a stress to elicit an adaptation response, that otherwise wouldn't occur with just a single work set.