After you've been exercising for a while, you'll need to increase the intensity of your workouts if you want to continue improving both physically and mentally. You can adjust intensity in several different ways, such as increasing volume or increasing weight. Supersetting is a training technique that not only ramps up the intensity of your workout, but it also saves you time.
Identification
A superset is two exercises performed back to back with no rest in between. The two exercises can work the same muscle group or opposing muscle groups. Do a series of bicep and triceps supersets to ramp up the intensity of your arm workout. Each superset consists of one bicep exercise immediately followed by a triceps exercise, or vice versa. Although you don't rest between the two superset exercises, you do rest after each superset.
Benefits
Supersets increase the intensity of your arm workout and save you time. If you do three sets of triceps extensions with a one-minute rest between sets, then you do three sets of bicep curls with one minute rest between sets, this is not as challenging as doing three supersets of extensions and curls. Your arm muscles have less downtime during the superset workout. This not only makes for a more intense workout, but it saves you time. In the first example, you have six minutes of downtime; in the superset example, you only have three minutes of downtime.
Drawbacks
Increasing the intensity of your workouts prompts your body to improve and change. However, Dr. Warren Willey, an osteopathic physician, notes that too much intensity can lead to overtraining, which can cause fatigue, lack of motivation, soreness and impaired recovery from exercise. You should use intensity techniques, such as supersetting, sparingly and give yourself plenty of time to recover. If you do superset your arm workout, you need to rest one or two days before doing any chest or back exercises. Most back exercises involve the biceps and most chest exercises involve the triceps. If you work your chest or back too soon, you risk overtraining your arms.
Considerations
Your arm supersets can consist of any bicep or triceps exercises. However, you need to move quickly from one exercise to the next. Unless you use the same weight for both exercises, don't superset two barbell exercises together; it takes too long to unload and load the weight on the bar. Dumbbells are easier to exchange quickly. If you're at a gym, select exercises you can do in the same general area. If you have to walk across the gym to do the second exercise, that negates the intensity effect of the superset.
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