Agonist-antagonist Paired Sets: Here’s Why You Should Probably Use Them in Your Workouts
This is how most people train:
And this is how some of my clients and I train:
I’ll use my flawless logic to explain why I train using agonist-antagonist paired sets and why you should probably do the same.
For those of you who need some verbal diarrhea instead of an infographic to understand things: Agonist-antagonist paired set is a way of training where you perform a set of an exercise (e.g. bench press) immediately followed by a set of another exercise that trains the opposing muscle groups (e.g. cable row). Only then do you take a rest before performing the next paired set.
In the interest of not letting this post snowball into a 5,000-word novella, let’s dive into the research and see what advantages it has over traditional straight-set training.
A 2017 study looked at the bench press and seated row performance during paired-set and traditional-set (i.e. straight-set) training. Here’s what they did:
Once the study was over the researchers told the subjects piss off we’re done here thank you die soon we need to assess the findings. And assess they did.
First, unsurprisingly, they found that the paired-set group completed the workout in roughly half the time of the traditional-set group. I said “unsurprisingly” because structuring training in paired sets has been found to be an efficient way to train in previous studies too:
I know you might be wondering, and I know you are not, but my workouts went from lasting an hour and a…
