Quaranturnt Day 26 - From Arnold to the Army

Hi Crew,

First of all, we passed 100 quaranturnters (term is a work in progress....)! Yay that's awesome! Like everyone, I have had a hard time with this whole quarantine thing and having the opportunity to help this community has given me so much purpose. Thanks so much for sharing this with people, my friends. 

Some of you have been asking me some questions. I love it, please do ask me questions so I can cover it here! Today, I’ll go through how I think about supersets. 

First, what is a superset? Essentially it’s parallelization rather than doing movements in serial. A super set is when you do multiple movements back to back rather than finishing all sets for movement 1 before moving onto movement 2. Ex: 10 reps of shoulder press straight into 10 reps of reverse flies with 3 rounds of all this, as opposed to the typical 3x10 shoulder press before moving on to 3x10 reverse flies. Notice: we are doing a superset today!

Reasons for supersets:

• Getting through movements quickly - You don’t rest between movements so you save time that way
• Hitting a range of muscles - No single movement gets all parts of your shoulder well but if you look at a superset as just a complex movement, it does!
• Enabling higher rep ranges - You may not be able to do 40 pushups straight, but if you do 20 at a wide-arm stance, and 20 tight-armed, you might make all 40! Sure you’re redistributing the weight by shifting your position, but you’re still using those muscles. So you enable more work to be done at once and thus more results of a certain kind. 
• Conditioning - At an extreme, your body may become accustomed to diverting all your blood to one part of your body, leaving you unable to adapt in complex fitness environments. Imagine you are doing a bunch of upper body work (climbing up a mountain face) but then can’t run after that because your legs aren’t getting blood. A super set could help you condition for transfering blood between muscle groups. 

Reasons against supersets:

• The main one for me is predictability - I know what I can do for 10 reps of heavy barbell shoulder presses. I have trained that for years and I know what I can hit for 4 sets with sufficient rest. But if you tell me I have to also add 20 pushups and 15 high pulls between each shoulder press set...I don’t know what I can do anymore. And thus I can’t plan to lift the most weight possible for me anymore. So I won’t get the optimal strength-building workout. 

So for now, where a lot of you are, don’t worry about it. You don’t have heavy weights at home even if you wanted to. And you may not know what your heavy sets would look like if you did. But eventually, if you commit to strength building and one day are allowed back in the gym, this is good stuff to keep in mind!
Here’s the IG post.