Why You Should Do Supersets? (part 2)

There are a couple different schools of thought on this, actually.

For the most part, I'm in favor of pairing up exercises that target antagonistic bodyparts. This means pairing up bodyparts that move in opposite directions or perform opposite movements.

For example, for the upper body, pushing muscles and pulling muscles would be antagonistic. One set of muscles performs the function of moving a load away from you. The other set of muscles performs the function of moving a load toward you. So, I would recommend pairing up a pressing movement with a pulling movement.

Now, you could do this in two different ways - you could pair up vertical plane movements (so an overhead press variation would be paired with a chin or pullup variation and a bench press variation would be paired up with a row variation) or you could go one of each (vertical push with horizontal pull and vice versa).

Biceps and triceps would be another example of upper body antagonistic muscles.

For the lower body, movements that are quadricep based (like squats) could be paired up with movements that are posterior chain based (like swings or romanian deadlifts).

Or, you could take a totally random approach and pair up one exercise from the lower body and one exercise from the upper body. So you could do overhead presses, then deadlifts. Or squats followed up by chins. Or bench presses followed up by single leg squats.

The idea behind this is to get an element of PHA (Peripheral Heart Action) into your workouts.

PHA was a system of training developed by Bob Gajda, and was basically a way of training the heart without doing cardio. Gajda used it on circuit training (as opposed to just supersets), but the idea was that if he could string together exercises that targeted muscles at extreme ends of the body (say first shoulders, then calves, then chest, then quadriceps, then back, etc), he could force the heart to work harder, because it would be constantly pumping blood back and forth all around the body.

So a set of overhead presses would force the blood to the top of your body. Then a set of calf raises would force that blood right back down the body into the calves. Then a set of bench presses would force it back up the body into the chest, shoulders, and triceps. And so on.

You'd make the heart work harder and get a cardio workout without ever having to do any real 'cardio'.

Supersets that involve exercises with both the upper and lower body can (somewhat) accomplish the same thing.

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