Superset Bicep Workout

One of the main strengths of weight training for fitness is that it offers plenty of variability in both the exercises you do and the order in which you do them. The number of exercises that focus on the biceps muscle alone could keep you in the gym for hours without ever repeating a routine -- and when you alter the structure of your sets and repetitions, you have a near-infinite number of combinations for your workouts. For example, instead of standard or progressive sets with your biceps routines, use supersets to work out your arms and employ muscle confusion principles for consistent performance gains.

  1. Superset Basics

    • A superset is a combination of two exercises that work opposing muscle groups back-to-back. The superset structure demands short bursts of activity combined with variability to give you a tough workout. With a standard set structure, you would do three sets of a specific exercise, resting for up to two minutes in between sets. As your body develops muscle memory, it will adjust to rote repetitions quickly, diminishing your performance gains. With a superset, you never do a set of the same exercise twice in a session. Your biceps workout will still involve multiple sets, only you'll spread them out among many exercises rather than concentrating them on two or three.

    Opposing Muscle Groups

    • Supersets operate by pairing exercises for your body's opposing muscles. The opposing muscle for the biceps is the triceps, so every biceps superset will include a biceps exercise paired with a triceps exercise. For example, one biceps superset would be 12 reps of biceps curls followed immediately by 12 triceps presses. In most cases, it does not matter which order you do each exercise in, either the biceps or triceps may come first. In fact, week over week, switch up the order in which you do individual exercises in each of your supersets.

    Schedule

    • The one difficult element to a full superset workout is that it doesn't lend itself to split routines easily, since split routines group complementary muscle groups while supersets pair direct opposites together. While this suggests a full-body routine is ideal, you can split up your workouts so that you only work arms and shoulders on Day 1, chest and back on Day 2, rest on Day 3, legs on Day 4, arms and shoulders on Day 5, chest and back on Day 6, and another full rest period on Day 7. Due to the need for variability with supersets, switch up the order every few weeks to ensure your body doesn't acclimate to the schedule too easily.

    Considerations

    • Something else to remember with supersets is that the workouts don't use progressive overload to achieve steady, measurable results. This means that you won't be looking to increase the weight of each exercise week after week through multiple sets of the same exercise. It's possible to build strength and lean muscle mass with your biceps exercises through the intensity of the supersets rather than the steady building on previous performance. Remember, like any other workout, you need adequate rest time for muscle recovery, otherwise you'll see no gains for your effort.