Why Drop Sets on Incline Dumbbell Presses - Dr. Mike Israetel approved? @RenaissancePeriodization

Published May 5, 2025 · by Michael Baker · 4m 27s · 1,209 views

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This video is part of the Get Up Earlier video library by Michael Baker, an ISSA Certified Personal Trainer, ISSA Certified Running Coach, IIN Integrative Nutrition Health Coach, Yoga Alliance RYT 200 who works exclusively with adults 40 and older. Latest marathon: Hartford 2026, 3:18 at 7:34/mi, a Boston qualifying time at age 51. Next goal: 3:10 at the NYC Marathon in 2027. Every video on this channel is filmed from his real coaching practice in Orange, Connecticut. New strength, nutrition, and marathon-training videos are published weekly, and they are designed to give the over-40 lifter and runner the practical, no-fluff context that generic YouTube fitness content almost never bothers to include.

All I’m trying to do is give good advice to people over 40 with limited time who want real strength and muscle. I train mostly beginners and I’m a big believer in both compound lifts and drop sets to get the most out of limited training time. As a digital professional anchored to a chair most of the day, when it's time to train I make sure to maximize every minute with focused, efficient, compound work. In this video I walk through exactly how I run a drop set on incline dumbbell presses, going from heavy to light, pushing to failure, and making sure to get that deep stretch Dr. Mike Israetel has drilled into my head.

Key Moments:

00:00:03 - Why I use drop sets with myself and clients to maximize time and effort

00:00:46 - Using compound lifts to hit multiple muscle groups efficiently

00:01:21 - Running a 3-stage drop set: 100s to 80s to 50s with focus on stretch

00:02:23 - Treating the final set like both a deep stretch and burnout

00:03:26 - No spotter? Drop sets give you solo forced reps, followed by deficit pushups and pullovers

Michael Baker

Strength Trainer & Nutrition Coach

https://GetUpEarlier.com

Digital Marketing Pro On-Demand

https://WebMBD.com

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Topics

Strength Training · Ironmaster Dumbbells

Transcript

Read full transcript (899 words)
One thing I like to do for myself and for anyone I'm training is instruction of drop sets and why they're so important. So, this for me is a heavy weight. And I was aiming to get it for like five or six times. I ended up getting it for six. I almost got it for seven. And that's fine. And when I'm done with this set because I still have some more gas in the tank, I'm going to do Look at Oh, come on. I'm going to do another set and then another set because my muscle hasn't been depleted. It can't continue to lift this weight, but it could still continue to lift a weight. And it gets me closer to my goal, which is ultimately for myself and for others is to maximize time. And to maximize time, you you go to muscle failure because muscle failure kind of helps you ensure that you're breaking your muscle down properly so that you can rebuild it back bigger and stronger. And I like to do this in as short of of an amount of time as possible and hit as many muscle groups as possible. So here I'm demonstrating incin dumbbell presses because these are training a lot of different body parts. It's a compound move and it's a very efficient compound move. Um you'll see now as I've went from the hundreds to the 80s at on this second set and this is an intermediary set. I used to just cut it in half and that would be my drop set. Now I'm doing three steps to finish. And see how low I'm trying to get and I'm trying to get a really good stretch at the bottom. I learned this from Dr. Mike Israel over and over repeating saying stretch it out at the bottom, even pause sometimes and then get it back up. So, I'm digging in really, really hard in that second set. And I think I just grabbed seven reps. Okay, here I am. Like, as fast as I can just get those weights out of my hand and get the new weights into my hand is as fast as I'm doing my next set. If it were barbells, it would be as fast as it would take me to strip the weight. Okay, so now I'm at half. So I went from 100 to 80 to 50 here with these 50s. Okay. And so this is half of your initial weight. You can take these eentric downward negatives, whatever you want to call them, real slow or not, but really try to pause at the bottom and get that deep stretch. If you're able to, if you have shoulder pain or tricep pain or some other kind of pain in in this exercise, obviously don't do this part. But I actually look at this like last set like it's it's a stretch along with really digging into the muscles. Like this hurts really bad right here because it's a weight that I can kind of do again and then I can kind of do it again and I feel like I can kind of go infinitely. And so I do. I go as literally as long as I can until absolutely positively no longer safely doing one more rep. And sometimes that takes five, sometimes that takes 18. Like I lost count of what I'm even doing here. I just went to failure. Yeah. So think about it like that. Think about it's like one long set that you can continue to do or it's forced reps that you don't have a spotter to help you with. Right. If you have a spotter, then you know, doing these extended drop sets aren't really as necessary. But if you don't have a spotter and you're just on your own and you want to continue on, you want to get the feeling of what it's like to get a forced rep, well, that's a lot of force reps. Most people would stop at a certain number. I'm going to do 100 lb dumbbells and if I can do them six times, I'm just going to stop there. But on your last set, why not? Why not just go total destruction? And to be honest, after I was done with those three, I jumped on the floor and did um deficit push-ups. So, I put the 50 lb dumbbells on the floor and I did push-ups so that my chest could go below the plane of like flat to the floor um just by an inch or so. And um I did a bunch of those and then I followed those with dumbbell pullovers. Um but I didn't need to illustrate that into in the video, but just so you know, it can continue on down. It doesn't have to stop at any set number. Whatever your nasty drop set's going to be, it's going to be. Some days you want to do more, some days you want to do less. But if you leave there with total destruction on your muscles and you feel like you got a really good pump and you feel like you've done the damage that you need to do in order to rebuild back bigger and stronger, then I think you did what you're supposed to do.

Key takeaways for adults 40+

  • Why this concept matters more after age 40, when recovery, joint integrity, and hormonal context are different than in your twenties.
  • How Michael actually applies it with his own coaching clients (not just theory from a textbook).
  • The most common mistake that derails progress on this exact topic, and how to avoid it.
  • How it connects to the bigger Get Up Earlier system: strength, running, nutrition, and accountability coaching built specifically for adults 40+.

About this video

Why Drop Sets on Incline Dumbbell Presses - Dr. Mike Israetel approved? @RenaissancePeriodization was published May 5, 2025 on the Get Up Earlier YouTube channel and ships with a 209-word description full of practical context for adults 40+ who want to train smarter, run longer, and eat cleaner. If you want to go deeper on this topic, check out 1-on-1 personal strength training in Orange, CT, browse the rest of Michael's blog for related articles, or contact Michael directly to talk about 1-on-1 coaching - in person in Orange and Milford, CT, or virtually from anywhere in the country.

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