Giant Sets: What They Are and How to Use Them

Giant sets sound like something made up by a bodybuilder who had too much pre-workout and not enough time: four or more exercises back-to-back with as little rest as possible between exercises.

They aren’t automatically superior to good old straight sets, but they pack much more work into the same timeframe.

They are also not just random exercises done fast. A good giant set has structure and exercises that build on each other.

Here’s how you can use them in your training.

What Is a Giant Set?

A giant set is an advanced training technique where you do four or more exercises in a row.

You complete all exercises in one long round or circuit, which counts as one set of the giant set. You only get to rest after you’ve completed all the exercises in the round.

For example, a chest giant set might look like this:

1. Bench Press
2. Incline Dumbbell Press
3. Cable Fly
4. Push-Up

All done one after the other, moving from exercise to exercise without resting.

After one such round + rest, you can repeat for multiple giant sets.

Giant sets are closely related to supersets and tri-sets, but bigger and meaner:

• A superset = 2 exercises performed back-to-back.
• A tri-set = 3 exercises performed back-to-back.

A giant set usually means between 4 and 6 exercises. Beyond six, you’re getting into metabolic conditioning territory, which isn’t a bad thing, just a different goal.

Rest between exercises in a giant set is usually as short as possible: just the time it takes you to move from one exercise to the next.

After completing a giant set, you take a normal set rest—sometimes longer, because they build up a ton of fatigue.

Why Giant Sets Work

The biggest reason giant sets work isn’t because they activate some potent hypertrophy pathway.

They work because they help you do more work in less time.

For building muscle, the big guns are hard sets, enough weekly volume, progressive overload, technique, and recovery. And doing it over and over for a long time.

Giant sets are just a way to organize those ingredients into a tasty muscle-growth stew.

Their main benefits are practical.

Benefits of Giant Sets

The big benefit of giant sets isn’t that they feel hardcore (though they do).

Let’s look at the main ones.

Giant Sets for Muscle vs. Strength

Giant sets are better for hypertrophy and conditioning than they are for pure maximal strength.

If your goal is to be as strong as possible in, for example, the squat, bench press, deadlift, or overhead press, you need heavy, high-quality sets with enough rest to produce force.

Heavy strength work is skill-based and requires a lot from your nervous system. You want clean reps, stable positions, and high output.

So, doing heavy strength work in a fatiguing circuit is probably a bad trade.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to avoid giant sets like the plague if you’re training for strength.

They help you improve weak points, increase training volume, and make you more able to tolerate hard workouts. Plus, a bigger muscle is almost always a stronger muscle.

If you’re a strength athlete (powerlifter, Olympic lifter), you can sprinkle giant sets in your training, but they aren’t something you should build your workouts around.

A strength-focused workout with giant sets might look like this:

You perform your main lift first, with normal rest. For example, squats for 4 sets of 3–5 reps with 2–4 minutes of rest.

Then you use a lower-body giant set for hypertrophy work:

1. Romanian Deadlift
2. Walking Lunge
3. Leg Curl
4. Calf Raise

Is that structure better for strength gains than just doing each exercise in order, the old-fashioned way?

No, probably not.

But it gives you the best of both worlds: heavy, high-quality strength practice first, then muscle-building work after. And it takes less time, which can sometimes be the difference between getting a good workout and missing one.

The Main Types of Giant Sets

There are several ways you can design giant sets. Here are five of the most common.

1. Same-Muscle Giant Set

The first is the same-muscle giant set, the classic bodybuilding version. Also called agonist giant set.

You pick at least four exercises for one muscle group and do them one after the other.

Example for shoulders:

1. Seated Dumbbell Press
2. Upright Row
3. Cable Lateral Raise
4. Reverse Machine Fly

2. Antagonist Giant Set

You alternate between opposing muscle groups, so one recovers while the other trains. This way, you keep fatigue low and intensity high.

This one is better for strength than same-muscle giant sets.

Example:

1. Bench Press
2. Barbell Row
3. Overhead Press
4. Pull-Up

3. Upper/Lower Giant Set

You alternate between upper-body and lower-body exercises.

Very time-efficient, and you can train almost every major muscle group in a short but intense workout.

Example:

1. Squat
2. Push-Up
3. Romanian Deadlift
4. Pull-Up

4. Push/Pull Giant Set

In this one, you alternate between pushing and pulling patterns.

Like with antagonist giant sets, you usually have time to recover between exercises for one movement pattern because you do something completely different in between.

Example:

1. Bench Press
2. Lat Pulldown
3. Bar Dip
4. Face Pull

5. Full-Body Giant Set

This giant set trains your entire body. You might combine upper body, lower body, core, and conditioning exercises.

It’s more for conditioning than max strength or bodybuilding. It can build muscle, but the limiting factor often becomes breathing and whole-body fatigue rather than your muscles themselves.

Example:

1. Deadlift
2. Push Press
3. Lunge
4. Pull-Up
5. Farmer’s Carry
6. Plank

Whew.

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Note that there can be a big overlap between types of giant sets. For example, the push/pull giant set above is also an antagonist giant set, and you could call the upper/lower giant set a full-body giant set.

• If all exercises hit the same muscles, a giant set is more bodybuilding-focused.
• If they alternate muscles or movement patterns, it becomes more conditioning- or performance-focused.

How to Build a Good Giant Set

Every good giant set should have a purpose.

The first thing to do before you throw a bunch of exercises together is to answer these questions: What do I want to do? What’s my goal?

Are you trying to build a certain muscle group? Bring up a weak point? Save time? Train conditioning and work capacity? Get a good pump?

The answer to that question changes both the type of giant set you’re going with and your exercise selection.

Start Heavy, Finish Easy

• For bodybuilding, I strongly suggest you put the hardest and heaviest exercise first. Put the lift that requires the most coordination and stability at the beginning.
• For strength, your best bet is to do a stand-alone compound lift first, then your giant set with accessories.

Your heavy-hitter first, then you move on to simpler, more isolating, and, yes, safer exercises as both your body and brain get more and more tired.

For example, for chest:

Barbell bench press first. Then dumbbell presses. Then cable flyes or machine work. And finish with push-ups.

That order makes the most sense because you do your heaviest exercise while you’re fresh, and the simplest movement when you’re tired.

You want to put technical or high-risk exercises first, at least if you’re doing a bodybuilding-style same-muscle giant set. Heavy barbell exercise goes at the start.

If you’re doing something like an upper/lower giant set, complex exercises can work in the middle, because you get to rest up before you get to them.

Don’t Be That Guy

You also want to stick with exercises that are easy to move between and don’t take up the entire gym.

If you’re in a crowded gym on a Monday evening, jury-rigging a giant set that requires a squat rack, two cable stations, a bench, three dumbbell pairs, and a machine is not practical or polite.

Better choices are any exercises you can do in one spot with minimal equipment.

A chest giant set might look like:

1. Bench Press
2. Incline Dumbbell Press
3. Dumbbell Fly
4. Push-Up

Much easier and less annoying (for both you and everyone else) to set up than defending five stations at once from fellow gym-goers.

Reps, Sets, and Rest

For muscle growth, most giant sets work best with moderate to high rep bodybuilding-style training.

For example, 3–4 giant sets (rounds), 8–15 reps per exercise, and 2–4 minutes of rest after each round.

• Stop your first exercise with 1–3 reps in reserve, or you’ll be too tired for the later exercises to be fully productive. And by round two or three, you’ll have built up systemic fatigue from the previous giant set to the point where your ability to produce force drops off.
• For heavier compound movements inside a giant set, keep your reps toward the lower end of those 8–15 and leave more in reserve. You don’t need to go to failure every set. In fact, you probably shouldn’t.
• For isolation movements, you can go higher: 12–20 reps or even more. That works really well, especially for exercises where fatigue stays local, like lateral raises, curls, triceps pushdowns, leg extensions, leg curls, rear delt work, calves, and abs.
• You can go closer to failure on later isolation work. The last exercise, sure, push it all the way to failure, especially if it’s simple and safe.

Remember that giant sets don’t override your need for training volume; they just let you hit that volume faster. One giant set consisting of 4 exercises can’t replace 12 regular sets. But three such giant sets do.

One more tip: when you introduce giant sets to your training, don’t add them on top of your current volume.

Replace the volume you were already doing.

If you were doing 4 chest exercises with 3 sets each, turn them into 3 giant sets instead of doing your original 4 exercises plus one or more giant sets.

Too much of a good thing can quickly turn into a bad thing.

Rest Times

Keep rest times within a giant set as short as possible, only as long as it takes to transition from one exercise to the next.

But between giant sets, you want to rest long enough so that the next round is productive.

If you rest 30 seconds after a four-exercise leg giant set, the next round will likely either become cardio with weights or burn you out in the middle. That can be fun, but it’s not ideal if your goal is muscle and strength.

In my experience, two to four minutes between rounds is a sweet spot. For lower-body giant sets, you might need even longer to become your high-performing self again.

How Heavy Should You Go?

If you’ve never tried a giant set before, it’s easy to go way too heavy.

Basically, you want to start with a lighter load than you would use for straight sets. That’s part of the giant set game.

The first exercise can be as heavy as usual, but stop before you hit failure. Your last rep should slow down, but not grind to a halt.

I would start with about 70–80% of your normal working weight for each exercise after the first, especially if you’re new to giant sets.

For example, if you normally dumbbell press 40 lb for 10 reps when fresh, you might try 30–34 lb inside a chest giant set. If you usually leg press 400 lb for 12, you might use 300–340 lb when you have lunges, leg extensions, and leg curls to go.

It’s OK to be exhausted at the end of a round, but you shouldn’t feel crushed by exercise one.

How to Progress Giant Sets

Progressive overload means doing a little more or a little harder work over time. It’s essential if you want to build muscle and get stronger.

Progression doesn’t have to mean adding weight every week. With giant sets, that’s pretty hard to do.

You can progress by doing more reps, adding load, adding a round, improving your technique, moving faster between exercises, using a harder variation, or completing a round with less perceived effort.

Let’s take the shoulder giant set from earlier. Suppose this is what it looks like right now:

1. Seated Dumbbell Press: 10 reps with 50 lb
2. Upright Row: 12 reps with 60 lb
3. Cable Lateral Raise: 15 reps with 15 lb
4. Reverse Machine Fly: 15 reps with 65 lb

Next workout, you might go for:

1. Seated Dumbbell Press: 11 reps, same weight
2. Upright Row: 12 reps, 65 lb
3. Cable Lateral Raise: 15 reps, same weight but better form
4. Reverse Machine Fly: 17 reps, same weight

That’s a very nice progression, even though you only increased the weight on one exercise.

Once you reach the top of your rep range across all rounds, increase the load a little and repeat the process.

How to Use Giant Sets With the StrengthLog Workout App

When you do giant sets on a regular basis, it’s essential to track your performance, arguably even more so than a traditional workout.

You’re flying through 4 or more exercises, and it’s easy for your workout to devolve into a cardio session where you lose track of whether you’re actually getting stronger.

• If your giant set workouts improve over time (more reps, heavier weight, better control, shorter rests) it’s probably working.
• If it just makes you tired while your numbers stagnate, well, that’s not going to be very productive.

In our free workout log app, StrengthLog, you can track your giant sets as well as any other types of workouts.

Without a tracking strategy, progressive overload becomes guesswork. And you don’t guess your way to gains.

Final Rep

Giant sets are a handy-dandy tool for making your workout focused, dense, and productive.

No, they’re not superior to traditional training for everything. For strength, straight sets wins. But for muscle growth and for building work capacity, giant sets can be just as good.

Giant sets make you tired. But done right, they solve a real problem: getting enough quality work done in less time.

Thanks for reading, and good luck with your training!

Want more?

Listen to episode 45 of The Strength Log podcast, where Daniel and Philip discuss many techniques to save time in the gym.

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Last reviewed: 2026-05-21

References

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3. J Strength Cond Res. 2025 Nov 1;39(11):1216-1234. The Acute and Chronic Effects of Superset Resistance Training Versus Traditional Resistance Training-A Narrative Review.
4. J Strength Cond Res. 2024 Aug 1;38(8):1372-1378. Efficacy of Supersets Versus Traditional Sets in Whole-Body Multiple-Joint Resistance Training: A Randomized Controlled Trial.