Supersets – What are Supersets and How Do They Work? Complete Guide 2019

Sooner or later the progress will slow down and you won’t improve as fast as you used to. Performance tends to stagnate and eventually, you may reach a plateau.

Then it’s time to open a bag of useful tricks and figure out how to overcome this frustrating phase.

One of the tools from this bag are so-called supersets.

Supersets are an intense and highly effective bodybuilding technique challenging the muscles in a special way.

This technique can show astounding results in a relatively short period of time.

Does this sound good to you? Then make sure to keep reading.

In today’s article, I’ll show you what is important to know about supersets and what different ways to do supersets exist.

Supersets are considered a kind of miracle weapon for strength athletes. They stimulate muscle growth by increasing training intensity extremely.

One the one hand supersets eliminate breaks between the sets which saves you time but one the other hand it also boosts fat burning due to your metabolism being in full swing.

As a study found, the calorie conversion was still significantly increased 24 hours after training.

This makes supersets particularly attractive for people who usually neglect cardio.

The concept behind supersets

Basically, in the superset workout, you do two or more exercises in quick succession to boost your muscles and stimulate them to grow with a different approach.

Supersets feel harder than traditional sets, that’s true. But why is that?

Well, that’s mainly due to the short or no rest times in between the sets. Seems logical, right?

It may even get you a great pump and makes your heart rate to skyrocket, but these things aren’t a powerful muscle-building stimulus.

Thus, supersets might rather be promising than they actually are. Nonetheless, you can do them from time to time if you want to, nothing wrong with that.

But I want to emphasize that you should not focus your core workout solely on supersets.

There different types of supersets, more precisely, three variations.

If the same muscles are trained with different exercises, this is called synergistic training.

If you train muscles and their opponents, we refer to it as antagonistic training.

Furthermore, supersets can also be done according to circle training. This means, one trains two or more muscle groups without a break.

One of the good things about supersets is that it not only challenges your muscles but also your will.

When choosing this technique, you will have to go to your limits, but if done correctly you get highly rewarded.

To put it in a nutshell, supersets refer to the combination of two exercises.

In plain English: at the of the first exercise, the next immediately follows and both are completed without a break in between.

Superset variations

As already mentioned, there are three different superset techniques that I want to share with you. In the following, I’ll explain what you need to know about them.

Synergistic superset

In this form of strength training, which incidentally is the most commonly used variation of supersets.

So, how does it work? Shortly speaking, one muscle group is trained with different exercises immediately in succession.

This works because the respective muscles are addressed in different ways.

Since it is almost impossible to activate all muscle fibers of a certain muscle with just one single exercise, supersets facilitate the stimulation of our muscles from different angles.

As a result, it ensures that as many muscle fibers as possible are demanded.

The trained muscle group is literally demanded to its maximum. But correspondingly, the training stimulus is very high and promotes an effective way to bring you to the next level.

Example: bench press (heavyweight) + any butterfly variation (low weight) for chest

First, you start off doing your set of bench press and immediately after it you switch to either a pre-loaded butterfly machine or dumbbell flys for example.

The advantage: The muscle is maximally trained and exhausted from different angles. This leads to stronger stimulation and thus faster muscle growth.

Especially strength athletes, who have reached a training plateau (stagnation), can stimulate new growth incentives with this method.

Antagonistic superset

Every muscle has an opponent, called antagonist. In other words, a flexor always needs an extensor.

If this were not the case, an angled body part would never come back to its original position, which would be rather impractical.

In the antagonistic superset, flexor and extensor are trained successively.

The advantage of this technique is its high intensity. When the activated muscle works, the opponent is actively stretched and blooded. The same applies vice versa.

Also, due to the lack of breaks in between each set, it leads to a high activation of the entire circulation. In turn, this also promotes fat loss after exercise, because the calorie consumption increases significantly.

In addition, you reduce the duration of the actual workout, as several muscles are trained in one go.

Finally, the intermuscular coordination improves. On the one hand, the interaction of agonist and antagonist.

On the other hand, also the intramuscular coordination which reveals the interaction of the individual muscle fibers.

A 2010 review conducted by researchers from the University of Ballarat found out that antagonist supersets allowed athletes to shorten their workouts while using weights that were just as heavy (in some cases even heavier) than in traditional programmes.

The advantage: This method represents an effective and balanced way to avoid disregarding any opponent muscles.

For example, while the biceps is being exercised, triceps gets stretched and the same applies the other way around.

In addition, the risk of overtraining is lower since the individual muscle part is not as exhausted as when doing synergistic supersets.

Therefore, you can even further shorten the breaks between sets and thereby enhance your metabolism.

Circuit superset

If you really want to go for the best and push yourself to the limit, you can combine more than just two exercises in a row.

The intensity is correspondingly high and demands a lot from your body and mind.

This superset is more suited for advanced athletes rather than bloody beginners.

But still, if you’re a beginner with a good physical condition you may also dare to use combined supersets but obviously with less weight.

The advantage: Above all, the time savings. You can complete a full body workout in one session.

If you also reduce the breaks between overall sets to a minimum, you stimulate your metabolism particularly strong.

For example, you could do a pair of exercises (e.g. legs and abs) three times in a row without a break and just allow yourself to rest before the next pair of exercises.

How do supersets benefit us?

To put it shortly, you save on time, but not forfeit on muscles! You will be able to drastically shorten your workout without having to move less weight or do fewer exercises.

How is that possible? By saving half the recovery time. Thus results are maximum effectiveness with minimum time exposure.

Furthermore, supersets work well to fully train one specific muscle group. When training chest, for example, you can do an isolation exercise first (such as flying movements) and then do a heavy basic exercise (bench presses).

As the triceps are involved while bench pressing, the chest muscle can be pushed to their limits.

Overview advantages of superset training:

• Very high intensity
• Fast strength improvements and efficient muscle growth
• Shorter workouts
• Intensive training enhances the cardiovascular system
• Breakthrough option at training plateaus
• Mental training to strengthen willpower
• High-calorie consumption and afterburning effect

For whom is superset training suitable?

When doing supersets, the training becomes more intense, which is especially interesting for more advanced athletes. If you master all the exercises, you can fully concentrate on the intensity and completely exhaust yourself.

It is always amazing how much power a seemingly totally exhausted muscle is able to develop if one demands a different movement from it.

Is this also suitable for beginners?

Nevertheless, even less experienced athletes can benefit from superset workouts. They will get a better feeling for their body and learn which muscles work with and which against each other.

However, you should start with light weight and focus primarily on the appropriate technique and range of motion.

Not only does this reduce the risk of injury but also promotes a better mind-muscle connection.

But for most beginners, your body is presumably not yet ready for such extreme strains. Your ability to coordinate deteriorates with increasing fatigue, making it difficult to perform the exercise properly.

Thus, give it a try if you feel ready but be careful about the intensity and start slowly.

Final thoughts – What you should pay attention to

Let’s recap what is important for you to take home from today’s article.

As with any form of training, you should always make a short warm-up before entering into sweaty supersets.

Furthermore, it must be ensured that the required dumbbells or devices are free to use and pre-loaded to keep the breaks in between as short as possible.

Regarding the intensity, you should start slowly to get familiar with this training technique. It’s best to work with lower weights first and then gradually increase.

Although the muscles should be led to their limit, you should not overload them. Therefore, staying between 8-12 reps seems to be a good approach.

How often should you work out?

Well, due to the high intensity, beginners should keep it up down to one superset session per week. Advanced athletes can work with 2 superset workouts.

This is mainly because the muscles need additional time for regeneration with this intense technique. If you do not give them adequate rest, then you’re most likely to get yourself into overtraining.

In the end, this reduces your performance and power during strength training instead of getting stronger. That’s the opposite of what we want…

Moreover, you should not train with supersets all year round. Variation is important to promote new stimuli over time, which is why a period of about 6 weeks is suitable for this training technique.

Lastly, be sure to always maintain proper technique and execute correctly. It’s better to do a few reps less but with the right technique.

Especially the last reps, in which the muscles almost go to failure, are coordinatively demanding and respectively require even more attention.

Furthermore, you should ensure that all technically demanding exercises (e.g. squats, bench press, deadlifts) are always done at the beginning of your workout.

At the end of the day, there is no way around hard and consistent workouts to build your dream physique.

Supersets apparently are not meant to be done in every session and I would not recommend doing so either.

You should concentrate on your regular workout routine, focusing on heavy basic compound exercises and increase volume gradually.

For more in-depth about the optimal volume for hypertrophy, check out our complete guide!

Despite the fact that supersets save some time, you should not replace the main parts of your training with supersets.

This study shows that it is proven to be most effective in doing heavy compound exercises with “traditional sets”. You can still add supersets afterwards if you don’t want to relinquish on them.

I like them too, they’re fun to do and give you a great pump. But nevertheless, first things first.

Keep your core workout your core workout.

Another problem with supersets, though, is the lack of breaks in between. On the one hand, they stimulate more metabolic stress but that actually isn’t a strong muscle building factor.

On the other hand, this study shows that rest breaks about 1-2 minutes increase your performance in the upcoming set tremendously. You won’t be able to perform roughly as good as before.

Think about it. Apparently, it makes sense. It helps to settle your heart rate and mentally prepare. Otherwise, your performance may suffer a lot in the next set.

As you can see, there certainly are benefits that speak for supersets but also multiple disadvantages.

Thus, I can recommend you to implement supersets every now and then but keep your workout routine to the basics with traditional sets.

Do you implement supersets into your workouts? How frequently do you use them?

I am curious about your experiences, guys. Feel free to drop a comment and share your opinion with us!

As always, I hope this article answered all your questions. For any further concern, just contact us.

Thanks for reading, folks

Claas