Do supersets save time?

Logically, yes, as pairing the exercises means that you’ll be taking less rest time. A 2010 paper published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning recommended supersets for “lunch-break exercisers, personal training clients, or others who have a fixed period of approximately 30-40 minutes to exercise” due to the fact that the sessions were completed in faster time. However, unless you’re designing your entire workout around supersets or you’re just supersetting a couple of exercises at the end of your session, you won’t be saving heaps of time.

Do supersets build endurance?

“Supersets can helps to improve your muscular endurance, particularly if you are working the same muscle group,” Tess says. The reason is simply because you’ll be putting the muscle under load for longer, combined with the fact that you’ll be stimulating the muscle in slightly different ways to further fatigue it. For example, if you did a goblet squat followed by a reverse lunge, you will be loading and fatiguing the quads and glutes for more time.

Do supersets make you stronger?

If pure strength is your aim, supersets might not be the best technique in your programme. “If you want to build strength you need to be working in a lower rep range at a high percentage of your maximum weight,” explains Tess. “By the end of that straight set, you’d be pretty tired and wouldn’t really be able to go and execute another exercise with good performance.”

Rather than fatiguing the muscles with a huge amount of volume, focus on lifting as heavy as you can in your straight sets with longer rest periods. You’ll recruit more fast twitch muscle fibres which will grow your muscles back stronger.

Do supersets build muscle?

Because supersets can increase the volume of a workout (i.e the amount of weight and number of reps you use) it is suggested that they can also improve hypertrophy. “For this to occur, you should be working in supersets of 8-12 reps per exericse,” says Tess. “Because this will be with a lighter weight than your strength reps, your body will be ale to handle a little bit more stress afterwards.”

Supersets increase volume in a shorter time frame, which leads to greater hypertrophy gains. But if time’s not an issue, are your muscle-building goals better served with super or straight sets? Well, by pushing a muscle closer to fatigue, the bigger it will grow back… but if you are fatiguing a muscle so much that you need to reduce the weight or reps in the next set, you’ll be reducing the volume.

In other words, it’s a balancing act and you need to pick the exercises, reps and weights that work for you. “You don’t want to fly through a superset, but you shouldn’t be going ridiculously heavy. The last two reps should feel pretty challenging, but not so hard you can’t do them,” says Tess.

Supersets in strength training: how to pair exercises to build more muscle in less time