Every fortnight I email a newsletter to explain something about health and fitness that you most likely didn't know so you can enhance your training or make some positive changes with your health using little time or effort. Sometimes I might look at a series of new exercises or spend time explaining what the correct technique is so you can execute your work-outs more effectively. Other times I like to look in more detail at nutrition or lifestyle habits and debunk some of the myths that circulate in the community such as what's better for your health exercise or nutrition? One thing I have not discussed all that often is how to structure a training program and how to use different advanced methods like SUPERSETS to improve your results. In this article, I will discuss why this is such a great way to structure your training and how it applies to many different objectives and needs.

While there hundreds of different ways to structure your strength training program, one of the most common methods, and one that I use all the time with people of all ages, needs, and abilities is SUPERSETS!

Supersets contain pairings of exercises that can target the same muscle/muscle group, One set is performed of one of the exercises in the pair, then the other immediately afterwards. A short recovery can be taken between each pair before the next set is performed. For a long time I have used this type of training myself and not only is it great fun but it allows you to maximize your training time.

This type of workout method was originally known for being a great way to hit the muscle fibres and stimulate fast muscle growth, particularly if they targeted the same muscle group and medium to heavy weights are used. For this reason they have often been a key part of many body-builders and advanced strength training programs.

However, there are several other important aspects to using supersets that are extremely effective for the everyday person looking to get a bit stronger and fit. But where I find supersets are the most beneficial is with beginners who struggle to get their technique correct, and people trying to rehabilitate an injury. Not many people would associate using supersets with injury and rehab programs, but there is a very unique part of this training method that makes this method so valuable.

Let's discuss what these are.

Supersets Maximize Your Time at the Gym

If there is one thing that most people lack when it comes to exercise it is time. In a perfect world, we'd all have at least an hour a day to devote to our fitness. But in the real world, we know that for many of us this is unrealistic and 24 hours does not even seem nearly enough time to fit in work, home chores and family commitments yet alone workouts. Using something as simple as the superset method can cut your workout down to 30 minutes from 45 minutes without having to eliminate your favourite exercises.

While it may not feel like it at the time, the time you spend between your strength training sets adds up. Whether you’re having a drink of water, talking to friends, checking your phone, or listening to your music, every moment spent doing something besides working out lengthens the time of your workout. 

Don’t get me wrong, you need to rest between sets to allow the muscles to recover so you can lift to your potential again. Recovery is just as important as training itself. However, if you structure your program correctly you can save a stack of time without compromising your strength gains. If anything, you will enhance them!

During a superset, you’re skipping the break time between exercises. You’re saving tons of time! Whether you want to cut down on the time you spend at the gym or pack more into your workout routine—supersets are a time-effective way to keep you on track with your goals.

Supersets Improve Fitness, Burn Fat & Improve Heart Health

This is where you begin to see the massive advantages of using supersets, and how you can begin to enhance other important fitness factors by reducing your resting time.

Because there is less downtime between exercises, your heart cannot return to a resting state during a superset. Keeping your heart rate up encourages cardiovascular exercise, and cardiovascular exercise burns a ton of energy helping you to improve your fitness and simultaneously burn fat. More importantly, this type of training can dramatically improve your heart health and decrease your risk of chronic disease. If you think the only way to improve fitness is using cardio exercises like running and cycling then you have obviously never tried supersets before.

How does this work?

Let’s say that your first set in your superset routine is a chin-up and your second set is a squat. Even though your arms and upper back muscles get to rest during the squats which is the second part of the superset, your heart cannot slow down because high energy and oxygen levels are required for the glute and quad muscles; therefore, your heart must continue to pump blood at a fast rate throughout your body.  

The secret to this working is you must use exercises that require the use of your big muscle groups. The variation between a bicep curl and barbell squat is massive in terms of fitness demands. If you waste your time sitting on machines or doing endless isolated exercises like the bicep curl you will get little benefit to your cardiovascular system.

However, if you use “big” functional movements like squats, deadlifts, lunges, step-ups, push-ups and chin-ups your heart and lungs will get plenty of work. The leg exercises in particular place a massive stress onto the heart, as the body is forced to pump huge volumes of blood to the working muscles. The muscles in your legs are the largest muscles in your body, so when they are on the limit of their capability the heart is also working to its limit to keep oxygen in your blood so you can continue to move.

The harder your muscles work the more oxygen they require, which means we start breathing faster, our hearts start pumping faster, we get sweaty, and eventually have to stop to regain our breath. This is cardio.

You can read more about this in the article – Can you get fit lifting weights?

My favourite workout of all time features several supersets of big integrated movements mixed with a Turkish Get-up and Farmers walk between each superset.

The objective of this workout was to enhance strength into my body in the legs without compromising mobility in my upper body. I had suffered some massive injuries in the past few years (torn ACL in right knee, right shoulder impingement and FAI with my left hip) and was finding it tough to get back to full strength. Every time I seemed to make progress I would aggravate something.

I had really noticed my legs were not very strong with squats and deadlifts and I was constantly getting problems into my lower back if I started running a lot. I had never had lower back problems in my life and never from running so I wanted to clean this up. I had spent time rehabilitating all these things and they were at a point where I could progress to more challenging workouts, I just needed to find the right balance and mix.

What I decided to do was use a superset workout where I would pair a lower body focused movement with an upper body focused movement. I would choose six key exercises for the workout that would cover all of the fundamental movement patterns.
But the real “game changer” was when I added the Turkish Get-up and farmer’s walks after each superset to enhance either stability or mobility in the patterns I struggled with most being bend and gait.

Here is the program.

This is very similar to circuit training which usually involves setting up a series of exercises starting at a minimum of 4 and as many as 15 exercises and completing one set of each exercise in succession without resting between. One full round of the 4-15 exercises is effectively one round of the circuit.

The big difference between supersets and circuit training is the supersets do not compromise the maximal lift you can perform. The longer the circuit goes the more it drains your body of strength, which is fine if your goal is to build endurance and some fitness, but it does not allow you to build serious muscle. Whereas, the superset method does not drain your body as quickly and if you are clever it actually will maximize your strength gains. Which brings me to the next point.

Using Supersets to Build Muscle Really Fast

The superset example I used earlier mixed an upper body exercise (chin-up) with a lower body exercise (squat). This is a great way to work on the strength of two different exercises that are not compromised in either way by the workload they perform. While this is an excellent way to build some strength, you can manipulate your workout order to deliberately overload the muscles with two exercises of the same muscle group.

While this sounds like it will make the second exercise ineffective, it is exactly the opposite.

The time under tension the muscles are forced to endure creates enormous amounts of muscle fibre damage that consequently produce massive strength gains over the following days. This training method takes advantage of the fact that, just because you can no longer lift a weight, it doesn’t mean that your muscles are completely gone!

An example of this type of superset is performing a barbell squat first and immediately following up with a dumbbell walking lunge. Almost every muscle in the lower body is going to be under massive fatigue the longer this superset goes. The angles of the limbs in the squat differ to the lunge allowing certain muscle to work more than others in each movement. By combining the two together it ensures no muscle is left unchecked and is taken to full exhaustion.

To ensure this remains safe I always pick the more difficult exercises first or the one I really want to target and do not want it compromised in any way. One of my favourite workouts is using a contrast load with the two exercises. The still focus on the same muscle groups but one has a really high intensity strength approach whereas the other exercise has a low intensity endurance approach. This way I can get the best of both worlds.

See picture below of how I might use supersets to achieve this goal.

If you go to the article - Never skip legs day you will see several other advanced superset strength training workouts you could follow.

The last benefit is arguably the most important and this one applies to beginners and those suffering with muscle imbalances or pain.

For a stack of other supersets and advanced strength training methods make sure you grab a copy of The Little Black Book of Training Secrets below that provides you with 101 workouts!

Supersets Improve Joint Stability and Enhance Quality of Movement

Not many people would associate using advanced training techniques like supersets with injury and rehabilitation. Unlike the previous two benefits that discussed improving fitness, or developing huge muscle gains, this time we are seeking to improve movement quality and restore joint stability within the body. Rehabilitating an injury takes more than one exercise to do the job. It often requires a carefully designed program with a deliberate emphasis on supersets to do this. The exercise order is almost as important as the exercise selection.

When working with injury and trying to restore optimal movement to a joint or multiple joints you know you are going to come across two things.

1. Muscles that are tight and over-working.
2. Muscles that are weak and not performing their role.

Using isolated exercises to either mobilize or strengthen these muscles will not get you very far, for you will need to reconfigure the motor program that uses these muscles together within movement patterns. It is nearly always the weakened muscle/s that are the underlying problem but it is always very difficult trying to strengthen them without causing more pain.

The compensation within the faulty movement disrupts your attempts to strengthen these muscles via what is known as muscle inhibition.

In Vladimir Janda’s book “Assessment & Treatment of Muscle Imbalance” he explains great detail muscle inhibition and the difference between tonic and phasic muscles.

• In simple terms tonic system muscles are prone to tightness or shortness and are more concerned with stability, posture, and working for long periods. They are made up mostly of slow twitch fibres and are easily facilitated with constant repetitive movements.
• On the other side is the phasic system muscles who are prone to weakness or inhibition and more concerned with fast and powerful movements. They are predominately fast twitch muscle fibres and require specific movement to keep them functional.

The tonic muscles by way of their design begin to develop a method of overworking and dominating all movements and in essence “shut down” or "steal" the phasic muscles workload completely. This creates an imbalance within the body as muscles not capable to perform various movements continue to work developing trigger points and tightness, while at the same time other muscles are becoming weaker due to lack of work. The longer this stays this way the further the imbalance becomes and reaches a point of chronic pain. Which is why we MUST approach a muscular imbalance by identifying these tight muscles with tests and putting a plan in place to weaken their overworking nature.

To strengthen the weak muscles first without weakening the tonic muscles is a waste of time, as the tonic muscles will continue to “steal” the workload within the movement pattern and exacerbate the problem. On the flip side of this is where if only mobilize the tight muscles but fail to strengthen the weak ones you will also fail to make any significant changes.

Only a combination of the two will provide the best result.

Watch the video below for an example of this.

When the body is challenged with a movement it will do anything it can to find the path of least resistance and most importantly avoid pain. In the case of a stressful situation where you have to execute a movement not familiar to you this is vital so that your body will complete the task as best as it can. The brain is so smart it will just figure things out on its own to create a version of movement it feels it can handle.

In the book “Movement” by Gray Cook he makes a note of how many things a beginner to exercise may have to contend with when learning how to exercise. The brain will be firing multiple commands that are operating in the background such as;

• Avoid positions that are restrictive
• Avoid unfamiliar movements
• Avoid pain and stress
• Compensate and substitute where possible
• Compromise movement quality to gain movement quantity where needed
• Conserve energy where possible
• Do not rely on positions of weakness or instability
• Take the path of least resistance
• Seek comfort and pleasure

The body will choose quantity of movement over quality of movement. If it does not have adequate stability or strength to handle this task his body will create an alternative form of stabilizing in the form of stiffness. Unfortunately this stiffness will the joints of the necessary mobility required for efficient movement. Even worse it will begin to change other movements with similar timings and positions.

“The brain does not question if it is good or bad motor program, it will simply choose the program it knows the most and use that to produce movement”.

In the short term this is fine for the body has found a solution that is fast to implement and allows it to complete the current task or activity it needed to perform. Over the longer term this is a potential disaster for the inefficient technique will begin to cause damage to muscles and joints not designed to perform various roles under load and stress.

The poor technique becomes encoded into the nervous system as a permanent motor program once the person exceeds a certain threshold of repetition. This is known as a motor engram and is stored in the spinal cord. Paul Chek claims it takes 500 reps to learn a movement but as many as 5000 to change one!

This is why it is so important to learn correct techniques the first time.

There are many examples I could use that I have featured many times before of how to use supersets with injury and pain.

For shoulder injuries I am often combining trigger point release of muscles like teres major and infraspinatus and stretching of the pecs and lats, with a stability correction that targets weaker muscles like serratus anterior and lower trapezius with exercises like the wall slides as seen the video below.

Completing these corrective exercises separately does not work anywhere near as well as when they are used simultaneously. Why?

Releasing the trigger points without showing the body how to move without them or trying to improve the strength and function of the inhibited weak muscles means the stiffness will almost immediately return. The body does not know how to move without the trigger points and feels unstable without them so it has no choice but to bring it back.

Trying to complete stability exercises like the wall slides can be very difficult if the trigger points are active for they will prevent you from moving freely and without pain. This makes your stability training exercises ineffective at having any impact. The best way to make these more effective is to release the trigger points right before completing the exercise.

Another example is using various hip mobility drills prior to a deadlift or squat. Stiffness at the hips will inhibit the weaker glutes from firing and compromise your technique.

Anyone who comes to see me for either back pain or knee pain I am highly suspicious of a hip mobility being a factor. The lumbar spine and the knee joint are both primarily concerned with stability and the joint that sits between the two is the hips and as we have mentioned already it is designed for mobility. Any loss of motion at the hips will be made up at the knee or lumbar spine by sacrificing its stability to find the extra movement.

Just as we previously discussed with the shoulder, trying to work on your hip mobility separately is a good start but it will not be anywhere near as effective using the stability and strength correction immediately after the stretch or mobility drill you complete.

Watch the video below for an example of this.

With knee pain I am often combining ankle and hip mobility with a stability exercise for the knee. Often the weakness is associated with muscles like the glutes, vmo, and even the feet. Using this simple mobility release first, followed by a stability exercise is a great way to reverse the compensation creating movement dysfunction and pain.

To see a ton of other examples of how I use this simple superset method go to the article - Functional movement is everything and this is why and you will find 7 videos that discuss each of the main movement patterns and how each video has several mobility corrections followed by a stability exercise.

Do You Need More Help

If you currently suffer with hip, knee, or back problems you will find our online programs shown below a great resource that take you through all of the assessments and corrective exercises to get you back to full strength and out of pain.

Summary

I hope you enjoyed finding out more about the value of supersets and now have a better understanding of how to structure your training program for maximal efficiency. It is great to know a lot of exercises and be able to complete them with good form, but if you always do 3 sets of 10 reps with a rest between sets you are not going to reach your full potential. You are definitely not going to maximise your training time either.

If you are suffering with an injury or pain this training method can make a massive difference to correcting your problems quickly. Once again you might have the right exercises and know exactly what you need, but the problem is you may not have the optimal structure for it to work. By applying some of these ideas you will give your body every chance of succeeding more effectively.

For more ideas and information on specific topics I may not have covered in detail be sure to check out our INDEX PAGE on the website that has over 300 of our best articles. These are all sorted into categories for quick reference so you can find what you are after more easily. You can also subscribe to our FREE fortnightly newsletter by clicking here.

If you do need specific help with your exercise program please feel free to reach out to me for help and we can set you up with your individualised program.

About The Author

Nick Jack is owner of No Regrets Personal Training and has over 16 years’ experience as a qualified Personal Trainer, Level 2 Rehabilitation trainer, CHEK practitioner, and Level 2 Sports conditioning Coach. Based in Melbourne Australia he specialises in providing solutions to injury and health problems for people of all ages using the latest methods of assessing movement and corrective exercise.

References:

• Movement - By Gray Cook
• Corrective Exercise Solutions - by Evan Osar
• Back Pain Mechanic - by Dr Stuart McGill
• Diagnosis & Treatment Of Movement Impairment Syndromes - By Shirley Sahrman
• Low Back Disorders - by Dr Stuart McGill
• Ultimate Back Fitness & Performance - by Dr Stuart McGill
• Core Stability - by Peak Performance
• Athletic Body in Balance - by Gray Cook
• Anatomy Trains - by Thomas Meyers
• Motor Learning and Performance - By Richard A Schmidt and Timothy D Lee
• Assessment & Treatment Of Muscle Imbalance - By Vladimir Janda
• How To Eat, Move & Be Healthy by Paul Chek
• Scientific Core Conditioning Correspondence Course - By Paul Chek
• Advanced Program Design - By Paul Chek
• Twist Conditioning Sports Strength - By Peter Twist
• Twist Conditioning Sports Movement - By Peter Twist
• Functional Training For Sports - By Mike Boyle