Muscle Multitasking

With Staggered Sets, You Work Two Diverse Areas Together

- Greg Merritt

STOP WASTING TIME

There’s a lot of idleness in a workout. All those rests between sets are lost opportunities to stimulate growth. Of course, you don’t want to take away from the muscles you’re resting, but you can work an unrelated muscle during that downtime. By hitting two body parts in the period that you’d normally work one, you can multitask your way to greater gains.

MUSCLE MULTITASKING

As a name, “staggered sets” is lame. “Diverse attack” would be clearer (and cooler), but “staggered” means you can work a smaller body part by alternating its sets with only some of the sets of a bigger body part. Smaller usually means calves, abs, and forearms, though it might also mean biceps, triceps, or deltoids. You can train abs with any other body part. Because you don’t want your grip lessened when doing, say, pulldowns, forearms should be worked only with legs; for similar reasons, calves can be worked with anything but legs. Any staggered work for biceps, triceps, or deltoids should also not rob strength from the bigger body part. So you can stagger in pushdowns with legs but not with chest presses (which also work triceps).