We’ve all seen them, the people that spend 2h in the gym with a cumulative training time of about 40min: If you are retired and have a lot of time, go for it! But for most people time is one of the most valuable things they have, so using it wisely is key. Don’t get me wrong; resting in between sets is important, especially if you work hard in the weight room, but that doesn’t mean you have to sit there and stare into the “nothing” (FYI: We all see if you check out your gym crush trough the mirror) for 5min before doing a 2nd set of bicep curls: There are many ways how you can use the rest time for your advantage.
Cirquit-Supersets
Probably as old as strength training itself, I am often astonished how few people use supersets of two exercises. This one is straight forward: Take two strength training exercises and combine them in a way that while resting Exercise A you do Exercise B: With the goal minimize rest times chose the exercises in a way, that one exercise is not interfering with the other: There are many possibilities but combining an arm or upper body with a lower body exercise is probably the most obvious one: Calf Raises with Biceps Curls, Triceps Extensions with Leg Curl but also Pull Ups with Lunges are simple combinations: You cannot eliminate all rest time, but the time you need for doing two exercises this way is just a little bit more than if you do one exercise alone. You can also combine 3 or even 4 exercises, but the biggest efficiency improvement you’ll have going from 1 to 2.
Fillers
I see Fillers the “little exercises” that have a different primary training objective than strength and that are normally not metabolically too taxing: As the name says you fill the time between the main strength training exercise with something “little” but useful. If, for example, you are doing heavy Back Squats you can use the rest time in between the sets to work on shoulder mobility or strengthen the rotator cuff with light band work: The Filler won’t negatively impact your Main Lift performance in the following set but will help you on the long way with other exercises and/or general health. Fillers are a great place for corrective and prehab exercises, to work on posture, balance, core, rhythm, hand-eye coordination etc. Including Fillers in the rest time may shorten your total warm up time as you don’t have to fit everything there.
One might wonder, why I made a distinction between fillers and supersets: Fillers obviously, are also used in a superset-way. For me the rationale behind it is a different one: Supersets have two exercises (what I would categorize as assistance strength exercises) with the same importance while fillers are done in combination with a main lift with a “little” exercise with a different focus than strength gains. It depends a little on your own categorization of exercises if you use something as a superset or filler exercise.
Blend in the warmup
A third way to use the rest times to your advantage is helpful when you have several compound strength training exercises in the work out that have “warmup sets” and “working sets”. You simply do the warmup sets of Exercise 2 in between the working sets of Exercise 1. To illustrate let’s say you do Squats and Bench Press in the same workout: While resting the working sets of the squats you can do e.g., Bench Press reps with bar only. This is a little tricky because once you’re already strong and where you draw the line between “working” and “warmup” sets the warmup sets get pretty intense, so make sure there is not too much interference.
I hope this helps someone to make more out of their gym time. I know, it’s nothing fancy and pretty obvious, but for me there is great value in doing the basic things well and doubling up the effective is something pretty basic to me. If you read so far, I give you another free advice for better gym time: Leave the mobile phone in the locker room, it does wonders!
