Compound, pyramid or supersets for strength?

As regular SPB subscribers will know, a great deal of evidence has accumulated in recent years demonstrating the benefits of strength training for athletes – not just strength and power athletes, but endurance athletes too, such as those competing in distance running and cycling events^(1-3). The traditional view of strength training in endurance sport is that it helps by improving resilience and reducing injury risk, which is certainly true enough⁽⁴⁾.

However, it has also become increasingly apparent that heavy strength training can benefit muscle economy⁽⁵⁾. In short, this means that muscles become more efficient at converting chemical energy into motion, which in turn means that less energy and oxygen is required to sustain a given pace, resulting in less fatigue, especially in longer duration events. The benefit of improved muscle economy cannot be overstated in endurance sports because research shows that excellent economy is a key factor for the superior performance of elite distance athletes⁽⁶⁾.

The right balance

The challenge for athletes in training however is how to add strength training to an existing program in a manner that is effective but without being overly demanding in terms of time or effort. After all, what’s the point in getting stronger if you’re too tired or short of time to complete your main (sports-specific) training?

One way round this conundrum is to strength train in a brief but intense manner; brief in order not to impose excessive time demands while allowing plenty of recovery, yet intensely enough to produce a meaningful and beneficial muscle stimulus. This combination can be achieved by ensuring that any strength training performed is ‘high-quality’. High quality training, which stresses the muscle fibres sufficiently, will produce a good training stimulus, even if training duration is brief. This stimulus will in turn will result in muscle and strength gains. By contrast, no amount of low quality training will produce muscle and strength gains because it simply won’t overload the muscle tissues adequately to cause a training adaptation. As an analogy, think of a coconut shy at the fairground. You could throw hundreds of marbles, but no amount of direct hits on the coconut will dislodge it. Yet one accurately aimed brick would very quickly produce the powerful stimulus you want and dislodge that coconut from its perch!

The brick of intensity

Although it’s a simple word, intensity as a concept when applied to strength training is sometimes hard to grasp, especially for more novice strength trainers. Generating intensity during a strength-training session is most definitely not about running round the gym like a headless chicken throwing the weights about with poor form. What it is about is making muscles perform a greater volume of hard work per unit of time^(7). Athletes who have ever had to cram a normal workout into shorter time period because of time pressure frequently remark how much they ‘felt’ the effects the next day. The reason is simple; in an effort to fit all the exercises in a shorter than normal time period, they unwittingly generated increased intensity!

 Supersets and intensity 

The most common mode of resistance training is to employ a traditional ‘muscle group by muscle group’ approach. One sub-category of this mode is known as compound training, where muscle groups are trained in succession –but where a primary exercise is selected as the ‘core’ exercise and supplemented with related assistance exercises. An example would be the use of squats as the primary lower body exercise to develop leg strength, which could then be complemented by calf raises and hip extensions⁽⁸⁾. The benefit of using compound strength training is that it’s simple to apply and tends to ensure there’s ample time for inter-set recovery, making it a good starting point for novice strength trainers. The downside however is that as well as being somewhat more time consuming, compound training makes it harder to generate ‘intensity shocks’, which are sometimes needed to move on from a training plateau.

There are however, there are many other approaches that can generate good intensity. In a fairly recent SPB article, we looked at the concept of generating intensity in a strength session by employing a ‘superset’ structure. Supersets commonly take advantage of the muscle agonist/antagonist principle by working pairs of muscles with opposite actions (eg hamstrings/quadriceps, biceps/triceps, chest/upper back etc) back to back, without pausing in between⁽⁹⁾. However, they can also be used to hit the same muscle group from different angles using two exercises. Regardless, supersets effectively eliminate the ‘dead time’ in between sets - which occurs when muscles are worked consecutively with multiple sets of different exercises (see figure 1). The advantage of supersets is that they can generate very high intensities. However, that can also be a downside since supersets also generate high levels of fatigue and metabolic stress, which entails longer periods of post-workout recovery.

Figure 1: Superset vs. traditional set structure