Alright ya’ll, time for another Workout Wednesday!  This month’s workout is all about the upper body burn and sculpting that back and those guns!  This is a superset workout that hits all the major muscle groups and is great for when you have a crazy week and need to compress multiple upper body days into one.  Umm hello??  My life lately.

This workout includes all supersets, which I love as a time-saver.  They basically mean that you perform the exercises within a given superset back-to-back with little to no rest in between.  After you’ve completed each round of the exercises in the superset, you can take a short rest before doing the next round of those same exercises.  For example, in the first superset of this workout, you would do bench press immediately followed by rows with no rest.  Then you can rest about 1 minute before doing it again.  You would then repeat this process for a total of 4 sets before moving on to the next round of supersets.

The Good:

• You don’t need a ton of equipment for this workout.
• There are plenty of substitutes you can do to adapt this workout to your fitness level and available equipment.

The Bad:

• As with all supersets, you’ll need two different equipment set-ups ready to go at the same time.  Depending on your gym layout, this can be tough during peak gym hours.
• When you work all the major upper body/arm muscle groups at once, you’re bound to have jello arms.  Have fun washing your hair later.

Time needed: approx. 45 minutes

Equipment needed:

• Bench
• Barbell and plates OR dumbbells
• Pull up bar
• Dip bar (can sub with bench)

Don’t forget to add in some warmup movements to help avoid injury!  Check out the warmup from this workout for some good ideas for upper body warmups.

Bread and Butter

 

Superset 1 – 4 sets of 8-10 reps each:

• Barbell bench press (can sub with dumbbells)
• Bent over row (can sub with t-bar row, one-arm dumbbell row, etc.)

Superset 2 – 4 sets of 8-10 reps each:

• Barbell shoulder press (can sub with dumbbells)
• Pull-ups (can scale with assisted pull-ups or lat pull downs)

Superset 3 – 3 sets of 8-10 reps each:

• Bicep curls (using EZ curl bar, dumbbells, or barbell, etc.)
• Bar dips (can do these on a bench or machine too)

If you’re a glutton for punishment, you can finish this workout off with some sprints on the rowing machine.  Happy sweating 😉

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