Science: Mix Up Your Workouts With Drop Sets, Not Supersets

If you need to bust out of a weight room rut, here's the smarter way to do it.
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If you're still hacking away at the same tired three-sets-of-eight-exercises lifting routine you developed by browsing weight-lifting message boards in high school, it might be time to try something a different. Since the dawn of the weight rom, bros everywhere have vigorously debated the merits of supersets, which are sequences of exercises performed back-to-back with little or no rest in between, and drop sets, in which the lifter performs multiple sets of the same exercise while decreasing the weight with each subsequent set. (If the weight is increased with each set, that's a reverse drop set.)

Loudly talking about these concepts within earshot of others definitely makes you sound cool (no it doesn't), but the more fundamental question is whether they actually do anything to improve your training, or are just overhyped fitness gimmicks. Fortunately, a pair of newly-released studies aims to provide some answers to these burning questions. A team of Japanese researchers who tested the effects of drop-setting and reverse drop-setting on close-grip bench press performance found that the drop-setters' muscle power was much higher than the reverse drop-setters' results. This effect was observed only in people who already knew their way around a dumbbell rack, though, as inexperienced test subjects experienced no similar bump in performance. Critically, among the drop-setters, the researchers also observed greater levels of intramuscular hypoxic stimulation—the condition closely associated with muscle hypertrophy. (Read: GETTING HUGE, MAN.)

A separate study the effects of supersets, however, did not yield such promising results. Researchers in Brazil put a crew of gym veterans through a superset program that required back-to-back completion of lifts targeting the same muscle groups—bench press and pec deck for the upper body, and a leg press and leg extension for the lower body. When compared to participants who mixed up the order of the exercises, though, the team found no significant difference in energy expenditure, as measured by our old friend maximal oxygen uptake. These findings held up even an hour after the workout was completed, too—in other words, supersetting had no effect on excess post-exercise oxygen consumption, or EPOC, which is the Holy Grail "afterburn" effect observed after particularly strenuous workouts.

Neither study went so far as to say that supersets or drop sets are bad for the user, of course, so if you want to give them both a shot, feel free! Many people like to use supersets to target opposing muscle groups—for example, biceps and triceps—instead of the same groups twice, and the study was limited to the second iteration. Working out like this also might help you to exercise more efficiently, since it cuts down on the time you spend "recovering" while sitting on an unused bench and scrolling idly through Twitter. But if you do need a way to break out of a plateau, these studies suggest that drop sets are the smarter way to go about it.


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