A 30-year-old man built muscle and burned fat in 4 months with a time-saving workout technique

“I wanted to get the magazine cover body,” Frade, 30, said. “I thought there must be some secret I don’t know.”

About four months ago he, started working with Adam Enaz, a personal trainer who champions a well-researched, increasingly popular exercise technique known as a superset.

While there is good evidence that resting 1-3 minutes between sets of exercise is ideal for building muscle, that adds up to a lot of extra minutes (and eventually hours) in the gym.

With supersets, you combine complementary exercises, without taking a break in between. A recent preprint study found this method to be extremely effective for building muscle.

With a little planning, supersets can be a great way to save time in the gym without sacrificing gains, according to Enaz.

After changing up his workouts and slightly adjusting his diet, Frade not only saw more visibly defined muscle, but also increased all of his lifts in the process, without spending long hours exercising.

“We managed to create a very short but very effective workout,” he said. “After work I know I have to go to the gym but I’m in and out.”

Supersets combine exercises for more gains in less time

Building muscle and strength isn’t just about how hard you work — in order for the muscle to grow, you need rest too, Enaz told Business Insider.

“The longer you rest, the more muscle you gain,” Enaz said.

To harness the benefits of rest, Enaz uses a specific variation of the technique called an antagonist superset, in which the paired exercises use opposing muscle groups, like chest and back or biceps and triceps. Another type of superset involves pairing unrelated muscle groups, like upper and lower body.

In theory, researchers and trainers say, the combos allow one muscle group to rest while you’re working a different muscle group with another exercise, tapping into the benefits of rest without added time.

For Frade, it means spending more of his precious time in the gym making gains.

“It saves time on waiting around for the muscle to be ready for the next set,” he said.

Ditching the ‘bro split’ in favor of full-body workouts

Another benefit of the superset method is that makes it possible to move beyond the so-called “bro split,” Enaz told BI.

The “bro split” is a pretty standard approach to a gym routine: crush a specific muscle group at a time, with exercises from every angle.

Using supersets, you can create a full-body plan, and work out harder, because you’re not exhausting any one muscle group. Enaz, who is also a clinical dietitian, said that’s a benefit if your goal is fat loss, because a full-body workout offers more opportunities for calorie burn.

Frade said the overall evidence-based approach appealed to him “as a data guy,” and that doing four sessions a week for no more than an hour each fit his ambitious schedule.

Doing a few sets per muscle group more frequently allowed him to make each set count by adding more weight and pushing himself harder, he said.

To burn fat, Frade also dialed in his diet, maintaining a small calorie deficit to burn fat by being more mindful of how much he consumed.

“I can eat everything, I just compromise on the portions,” he said.

Seeing his progress boosted his drive to keep going.

“What I was always lacking was consistency and motivation. I would work hard for two weeks and didn’t see changes so I would stop,” Frade said.

Sticking to his goal and following through gave him a sense of confidence. “It doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it’s possible. I’ve taken that to work, too.”