Lifters do this with the expectation of hitting the muscle group hard repeatedly, resulting in greater muscular damage. If you paired a heavy deadlift (which is extremely taxing on the lower back) with a heavy standing overhead press (which requires a great deal of lower back stability to prevent injury), you’ve got an easy recipe for disaster.Īnother variation is to superset exercises which use the same muscle group. Some exercises simply don’t pair well together. When pairing compound movements, even compound movements with no practical muscular crossover (for example, a bench press and a squat, or something similar), the systemic fatigue from one lift makes it hard to complete the other in a practical time frame. This makes them awesomely effective at making you strong and sexy, but also means that you get tired out more quickly. It’s also a matter of what types of exercises you’re using.Ĭompound movements, which use a lot of muscles together at once, correspondingly generate a lot of fatigue and tire out a lot of muscles at once. The more exercises involved, the harder it gets to tell exactly how you can advance the workout in order to continue to get better results. It gets worse when we compare more than two exercises, as in tri-sets.Ĭircuit training, which is also similar but relies on even more exercises, further complicates everything. But if you’re rushing through 3 sets of each for a total of 6 sets, it’s unclear what the limiting factor holding back your progress is - the biceps? The triceps? The overall metabolic demand on recovery? Which part should we focus on increasing the difficulty of - the weight of the bicep curl, or the tricep extension, or the repetition range of either, or the speed with which sets are completed, which increases recovery demand?įor example, it's highly possible that by adding weight to the bicep curl in this superset, I cause my triceps extension to suffer, because the greater overall fatigue leaves me in a poorer position to progress for the triceps. One of the problems of methods like supersets and tri-sets is that it makes it harder and harder to accurately judge what an effective load is, and then progress that load over time.įor example, if you superset a bicep curl and a tricep extension, you’re working out two opposing muscle groups. Of course, if you know me, you know I'm about to say that feeling alone isn't a good marker for progress.Ĭhasing “the pump” isn’t always productive. It’s well known that the biggest driver of long-term growth is progressive volume overload, not “how our workout feels”. The justification for these is usually just the incredible pump that they create, and thus the intense feeling of getting a good workout. Tri-sets are sets of 3 exercises performed back-to-back instead of 2.Ģ1’s are a special tri-set consisting of 7 reps of a half range of motion bicep curl, 7 reps of the other half range of motion, and 7 reps of the complete range of motion. I've also seen many variations on the standard format. For this reason, supersets can be a huge time saver. The point of supersets is to reduce time spent in the gym by allowing one muscle group to work while another one is resting - cutting down on time spent resting. Supersets may involve standard rest periods (resting between each exercise) or they may involve reduced or non-existent rest periods (waiting until all sets are done before resting fully). A commonly used exercise prescription is the use of supersets - a method in which you alternate a pair of exercises, back to back.
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