- SUPER LEAN 8 (SL8)
SUPER LEAN 8 (SL8)
Burn fat fast with this lethal combination of high-intensity training techniques – all wrapped up in a comprehensive 8-week training plan.
If you’re looking to burn some serious fat and you’re not afraid of a little intensity, you’ve come to the right program. Super Lean 8 (“SL8” for short) is an 8-week get-lean plan based mainly on supersets – but it’s so much more than that.
With SL8, the supersets pair exercises for the same muscle group. This is technically called a “compound set,” a term coined by the late Joe Weider over 50 years ago. But nowadays, the lifting community basically calls any pairing of two exercises with no rest in between a superset, so I’ll stick with the more modern verbiage.
Perfect Pairings – Get Shredded with Supersets
For each superset in SL8, one exercise is done with heavy weight for low reps and the other with light weight and high reps. In most cases, the first superset pairing per muscle group in a workout puts the heavy exercise first. Then, the order is reversed on the next pairing, where you’ll go light first. For many muscle groups, this second exercise pair is done as a pre-exhaust superset, with a single-joint (isolation) exercise serving as the light move followed by a heavier multi-joint (compound) exercise.
This bevy of training variables – light weight, heavy weight, supersets, pre-exhaust, compound moves, isolation moves – isn’t just for the sake of variety. There’s real science behind all of it. Supersets are employed because research shows that individuals who use supersets burn over 35% more calories during the workout and over 35% more calories after the training session, compared to those doing only straight sets.
As for the high-rep sets in SL8, these will instigate more calorie burning during the workout. Research found that doing 10-rep sets burned more calories in the workout than sets of five reps. This makes sense since you perform more work when doing more reps. This is why I bumped the sets up to 30 reps on some exercises in the final two weeks of the program. This "more work" effect is also the reason I increased the total number of sets performed per workout in Weeks 5-8 – to keep you burning more calories as your body adjusts to the program.