In weightlifting, “supersets” involve completing one exercise or variation and then immediately performing another, in an effort to further tax muscles that are shared between the exercises. So, for example, you might superset incline benchpress with cable flys, so that you tax your upper pecs and deltoids and then immediately perform an exercise that also targets the pecs but lessens the influence of deltoids, so that you can “burn out” your chest. I have tried supersets in the past, but get little out of them and haven’t bothered in years. (In general, I think people overemphasize intensity in the weight room relative to consistency and volume, but anything I might say in that regard would be pure bro science.) However, I WAMOW, so I don’t care what other people are doing for their workouts. But there’s a social element to supersets that should be attended to.
The downside is obvious, from a communal perspective: someone doing supersets is usually monopolizing several pieces of equipment. And so I would ask that, if you plan to do a superset, look around you at how crowded the gym is and ask whether it’s socially responsible to take up mulitple pieces of equipment at once. If the gym is half-empty, go for it. If the gym is crowded but the two pieces of equipment are right next to each other, it should be fine. But if it’s 6PM on a weeknight and you’re planning on taking up a Smith machine on one side of the gym and a pec dec on the other, I would encourage you to think about the common good and consider simply doing all of your sets of one exercise first and then switching to the other. You can live without that specific way to tax your muscles. And while I understand that sometimes supersets are performed to minimize time spent in the gym, consider the possibility that whatever you gain in time others are losing thanks to waiting for the equipment you’re monopolizing. Just use a little common sense and think of the greater good.
Also: please ensure that your superset actually makes sense from an exercise physiology standpoint. Recently I observed someone at my gym doing supersets of deadlifts and close-grip bench press. This makes just about zero sense to me - there are no shared muscles in the chain of those two exercises, so it’s unclear what advantage is being conferred that couldn’t be achieved simply by doing one exercise after the other. Again, ordinarily I would simply say that other people’s workouts are not my business, but deadlift platforms and benchpresses happen to be two of the most popular pieces of equipment in any gym. If you’re going to hog two pieces of equipment that many people are waiting for, please, make sure you’re doing so for a coherent exercise advantage.
Finally, if you must do supersets, do all the rest of us a favor and at least mark a particular station as taken with a towel or water bottle or similar. Several times in my life I have been amazed to find that, having started to use a particular piece of equipment, someone has rushed over from halfway across the room to tell me that they’re using it. How on earth am I to know that you’re using it, if you’re currently using a different piece of equipment on the either side of the gym? That’s just plain frustrating. Put a towel down to indicate that it’s taken, at the very least. I find it tiresome to have to go through the motions of laboriously asking if anyone is using a piece of equipment before using it, in the best of times. When you’re doing curls in the squat rack across the room and come running over to tell me that you’re also using the calf raise machine, it does genuinely piss me off.
I live in New York and so my gym is very frequently quite crowded; I recognize that most of you probably have to worry about a packed gym much less often. In any given day it might be perfectly fine for you to do supersets. But if it’s 10 AM on a Saturday and people are theatrically sighing in frustration because there’s a line to get on a squat rack, please use common courtesy and put the good of the gym as a whole above your own minor exercise advantage.
For those who are wondering, it appears that when I set my yearly goals for 2022 I was far too modest with my deadlifting goal and too ambitious with benchpress. I set a goal weight of 455 in deadlifts, but it looks very likely that I will pull that by the end of this month, only a quarter of the way through the year. Meanwhile my benchpress is going nowhere because of this damn shoulder. I’m probably going to do a post about my efforts to get this thing healed soon, tying it into the healthcare experience in the United States. Enough to say for now that in August I felt a pop in my left shoulder and had terrible pain and clicking, and after an MRI was diagnosed with another rotator cuff tear and significant tendonosis. And despite months of physical therapy and several orthopedist visits it just will not get right. When it was feeling at its best in January I foolishly did some diagnostic lifting and recorded a one-rep max of 275, just about where I was before injury. Felt fine when I did it, but the next day it felt like I was back at square one. (Yes, I’m a dumbass.) So right now I just can’t do any bench press variations, even close grip, multigrip, or floor press. I also can’t do most shoulder presses, which is particularly annoying because my delts are that one muscle for me that I obsess over the most, like most of us do. For now, benching just isn’t in the cards; I need unbroken rest. I hope in a couple months to be healthy enough to start doing work but I’m gonna have to go slow and carefully.
Totally agree about the social aspect. ONE PIECE OF EQUIPMENT AT A TIME in the shared gym.
Finally, a hot topic on which we can all agree.