Superset training: a double quick route to strength gains?

Regardless of their sport, most athletes understand that building strength and resilience can play a crucial role in a successful training program – for example by helping prevent injury. However, what is generally less appreciated is that a great deal of evidence has accumulated in recent years demonstrating significant performance benefits of strength training for athletes – not just strength and power athletes, but endurance athletes too, such as those competing in distance running and cycling events^(1-3). These benefits in endurance performance are in large part due to the increase in muscular efficiency that strength training brings, which means less oxygen is required to maintain a submaximal pace ^(4,5). The challenge for athletes in training however is how to add strength training to an existing program in a manner that is effective, but without being overly demanding in terms of time or effort. After all, what’s the point in getting stronger if you’re too tired or short of time to complete your main (sports-specific) training?

Supersets for time saving

The most common mode of resistance training is to employ a traditional ‘muscle group by muscle group’ approach. In this approach, a number of sets per muscle group are performed with a rest in between each set of 2-3 minutes for recovery before the next set commences. However, consider a full-body workout that trains the calves, thighs, buttocks, abdominals, lower back, upper back, chest, shoulders and arms, and where three sets per muscle group are performed. That’s 27 sets, which translates to a workout duration of at least 1 hour 20 minutes. Training twice per week means that athletes will be spending almost three hours per week on strength work - a serious time investment!

For athletes who are reluctant to spend that amount of time in the gym, a popular way to shorten and condense strength-training sessions into a much shorter time period is by employing a ‘superset’ approach. Supersets commonly take advantage of the muscle agonist/antagonist principle by working pairs of muscles with opposite actions (eg hamstrings or the rear thigh with quadriceps of the frontal thigh, biceps of the arm with triceps of the arm, chest muscles with the upper back muscles etc). These muscle pairs are worked back to back, without pausing in between⁽⁶⁾.

The theory of supersets is that while working one muscle group in the pair, the other muscle group in that pair has a chance to recover (see figure 1). They can also be used to hit the same muscle group from different angles using two back-to-back exercises. Regardless, the key point of supersets is that they effectively eliminate the ‘dead time’ in between sets (which occurs when muscles are worked consecutively with multiple sets of different exercises - see figure 1). An additional advantage of supersets is that they can generate very high intensities and a strong training adaptation stimulus. However, that can also be a downside since they also generate high levels of fatigue and metabolic stress, which entails longer periods of post-workout recovery.

Figure 1: Superset vs. traditional set structure