Heavy to light sets?

I've been lifting for about 2.5 to 3 years now. I change the exercises and number of reps I do in my workout routines, to keep my body adapting. I do all sorts of things to try to keep my body adapting. One thing that I have never really tried was changing the order in which the weight progressed when doing an exercise. What I mean is, I usually start off with something light, then go heavier, then really heavy and that is when I hit failure. But why not start out with the heavy weights and then move to lighter weights to reach failure. I'm sure lots of you already do this, so what I really want to know is what it does for you. Is this a good way to build strength?

liftin heavy is the way to build strength. go heavy first, like on bench or deads or squats, and after you hit your heavy sets (low reps) you can hit some lighter sets to burnout. works well for me. hope it helps

Ive been doing my workout like that for the past year or so. Heavy set's, down to light sets. It works nicely, I'm always sore as hell for the next 2-3 days after each muscle group. I always change up the order of exercises though. So for instance I do, for flat bench, 2 reps, then 5, then 8, then 10. Pyramiding the weight down. Good stuff.

Adrock, that is a good method but the hard part is getting properly warmed up. Even if you do warm up sets, it's really hard on your joints to go from 135lb sqaut into a 315lb squat. The jump is just too much in my opinion. I use the pyramid method.

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Originally posted by brad fuel
Adrock, that is a good method but the hard part is getting properly warmed up. Even if you do warm up sets, it's really hard on your joints to go from 135lb sqaut into a 315lb squat. The jump is just too much in my opinion. I use the pyramid method.

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See that is what I thought. I usually do some warm up sets before I start really lifting, but you are right going heavy right away would be a huge jump from the warm up sets. Maybe if I did leg press light to heavy before I did squats, then I could start heavy on squats.

My bench workout goes from light up to my max (370) then I go two sets 315 to failure, 2 sets 275 to failure, 2 sets 225 to failure. So I go light to heavy then back down, I like it.