Lou Schuler said that he didn't go halfway, when he messed up. And his biggest mess-up on New Rules of Lifting was in the way he addressed supersets. He knew it was a problem by late December of 2005, when the very first readers of the very first copies of the book to appear in stores started asking me a question he had hear hundreds of times in the next 12 months: "What the heck does 'superset with full rest' mean?"
His co-author, Alwyn Cosgrove, estimates he's gotten the question from more than a thousand readers.
Here's how badly Lou Schuler messed up: On page 205, Lou Schuler made this promise to readers: "Don't worry if you don't know what a superset is yet; all terms and instructions are fully explained in the workout chapters."
But just four pages later, you'll see a workout telling you to "superset with full rest" without any explanation at all.
There is an explanation, on page 212, of why Alwyn designs tat-loss programs with supersets, but no explanation of the phrase "with full rest." On page 218, Lou Schuler explain that the third and most advanced fat-loss program eliminates the rest between sets of a superset -- hence the label "superset with no rest until after final exercise."
But that isn't much help to the people who're still confused about the basic concepts.
Most lifters understand a "superset" to mean two exercises performed back-to-back with no rest in between. So if your workout calls for you to superset bench presses and rows, for example, you had do a set of bench presses, then immediately do a set of rows. Then you had stop to catch your breath before repeating the superset.
Usually, the idea of doing supersets that way is to create more fatigue, and thus burn more calories, with the goal of fat loss.
A superset with full rest is a slightly different animal. You aren't trying to create a deeper level of fatigue. Your goal is efficiency in your workout, combined with more time to recover between sets of each exercise.
Let's run some numbers:
Say you're doing supersets the traditional way. You take 30 seconds to do a set of bench presses and 30 seconds to do a set of rows, followed by 60 seconds of rest. So you begin your second set of bench presses 90 seconds after you finished the first. But you were still lifting during a third of that time, so even though your muscles have had 90 seconds to recover, the rest of you gets just 60 seconds to recover from 60 seconds of work. That's the equivalent of high-intensity interval training -- good for fat loss, certainly, but not an optimal way to make your muscles bigger and stronger.
Not let's say you're doing it Alwyn's way. You do your set of bench presses for 30 seconds, rest 60 seconds, do your set of rows for 30 seconds, and rest 60 seconds. When you start your next set of bench presses, your muscles have had 2 minutes and 30 seconds to recover -- 150 seconds total, with 120 seconds of pure, non-exercising, recovery time.
So when you pick up the weights for your next set of bench presses, you're certainly going to be stronger in this scenario than you would've been in the first. That allows you to work with heavier weights, and thus develop more strength and muscle size.
And yet, despite all that recovery time between sets of each exercise, you're still lifting for 30 seconds out of every 90 seconds you spend in the gym, which is an efficient use of your time.
Conversely, if you did "straight sets" -- you do all the sets of each exercise, resting in between sets, before moving on to the next exercise -- you had probably end up doing less total work.
Let's assume you start the workout with bench presses (every lifter starts with bench presses, right?). You do a set for 30 seconds, rest 60 seconds, do the next set for 30 seconds, and so on. Now you're working 30 seconds out of every 90, as in Alwyn's system, but your working muscles get just 60 seconds to recover, vs. 150. That means you'll use less weight on subsequent sets, and thus do less work, than you would with the longer recovery.
That's the long explanation for "superset with full rest." Lou Schuler hope it helps clear up the confusion, and Lou Schuler hope it further supports the point he made in my first post, which is that the goal of every program in NROL, whether it's labeled "fat loss" or "hypertrophy" or "strength," is to get stronger in each exercise from one workout to the next.
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