Unusual Use of Classic Technique 2

Yesterday we started talking about pre-exhaustion in the classic bodybuilder sense. It’s a great trick for muscle and strength, but let’s talk about using it in a more real-world applicable functional ability. I think that pre-exhaustion workouts are great because they toughen you up. They strengthen your mind muscle connection, help increase the size and strength of muscles, lots of great benefits. However what if you’re satisfied that you’re already a big enough behemoth. What if it doesn’t matter to you if you get any bigger or smaller as long as you can walk into a herd of water buffalos and immediately disperse them with one sharp look? What if your life-long dream has been to have the Conan-esque ability to knock out any wayward camel that chooses to disrespect you?

Well let’s talk about using this technique to further your abilities. As a general rule, it is smart to start most of your strength based workouts working from the big exercises down. You are most likely to put the greatest concentration into them, have the greatest energy and performance by doing the big, really important exercises first. But there are several ways you can take advantage of the pre-exhaustion technique to drive a particular muscle group or physical ability to a higher level.

Let’s talk about some of those now. Conditioning pre-exhaustion. Most workouts follow the strength first, conditioning later rule which is smart to do most of the time. But what if you reverse the order and pre-exhaust with a conditioning workout first. At first your strength will take a hit, because your body isn’t used to the stress. But you’ll quickly adapt and be able to handle respectable poundages even after conditioning. Lots of benefits here. Pushes your conditioning to a higher level because you force yourself to do high level strength work immediately after. Over a period of time it will force your pure strength to go up, because once you’ve come back to handling most of the weight you can, while you’re fresh after your conditioning, you have gotten stronger not just more efficient. When you revert back to the regular style of training you’ll see new gains in strength.

Grip pre-exhaustion. Most everybody trains their grip at the end of a workout. Again, smart to do most of the time, because if your grip is blown out your other exercises will probably suffer. But what if for a short period of time you did your grip workout first? Then adapted over the course of a few weeks to being able to handle the regular loads and exercises you use after your heavy hand work. Don’t you think your grip will have become markedly stronger if you can do the same pulls and presses after the specialized grip work? Then slip back to your regular order and see the new PRs in your pulls and presses.

This brings another question. Why do you include presses in that workout? Because many times, especially in an overhead movement the wrist may be the weak link in the chain. You can have all the power in the shoulder and triceps that you want, but if you can’t apply that pressure because your wrist can’t hold the weight, then you’ll never maximize what you can lift. A great way to get a PR on pressing movements is to train your wrists.

Use some serious nail bending, club or hammer levering, or Dennis Roger’s “Lever wrist curls” for a few weeks. Hit a PR on them and then test how strong your presses feel.

Tomorrow, we’ll go over more facets of how to use this pre-exhaustion to jump to new gains in strength, endurance and unbelievable physical ability.