Unusual Use of Classic Technique 3

Greetings! Hope you all had a blessed weekend. We certainly did. My son made a profession of faith and decided to be baptized. Nothing greater could have happened. Hope you all experience that for yourself and for your loved ones. No matter what else is going on our hope is always in Jesus Christ.

Here are just a couple more ways to use the interesting pre-exhausting techniques we discussed last week. Excellent programs to use short-term to help round out all the bases of your training.


HIGH REP PRE-EXHAUSTION

If you ask me how to build the most muscle and power I would tell you you need to do heavy exercise. I would also tell you the best way to do those exercises is to do a general body warm up and then a short specific warm up to the exercise that does not wear you out or burn you up before you get to your heaviest sets. However if you ask me about the totality of training I would tell you that at some point you need to be doing a combination of high, medium and low reps and in multiple exercise orders to ensure that you have a superior type of strength. Not just short term high level strength, but high level strength you can display after a large volume of work or in any conditioning or sports situation or at basically any time you choose. High rep pre-exhaustion is one of the ways you can train this.

I’ll give you two examples of how I’ve used it. My normal squat workout would be five sets of one rep. Afterward I would do some type of leg exercise for higher reps. However I have occasionally done the high reps first and built up over a short period of time to be able to get close to my normal maxes after high rep exhaustion. The first way is to do one to two sets of high rep barbell squats, 20-50 reps and then complete my normal 5 x 1 workout.

The second is do an extremely high rep bodyweight squat workout, 300-500 reps and then complete my normal 5 x 1 barbell squat workout. I’ve also used this alternately for other exercises. For instance 100 total reps of one arm dumbbell pressing with a moderate weight and then 3 x 1 up to a heavy single for the day. 300 push ups then 5 x 1 heavy bench presses (I no longer advise that workout. It’s tremendous body conditioning, but I believe that you put your pectorals at serious risk for injury because of the mechanics of the bench press when they’re already seriously pre-fatigued. However you get the point of the training), barbell row 100 reps then 4 x 1 heavy one-arm dumbbell rows.

When you get back to using your normal weights after the conditioning of the high reps, you know you’re in good shape and your strength has plenty of staying power.

Abdominal pre-exhaustion. The big lifts pay the big dividends. Squats, deadlifts, etc. They do so because they work the most muscle. Meaning every part of your body has to get strong and be strong to successfully complete big lifts. Your abdominals are of paramount importance for this. That means most of the time it’s not smart to exhaust your abdominals and then do a heavy full-body exercise. You need your abdominals to be just as strong as your legs and back if you’re going to successfully exercise the big muscles. But what if for a short time you pre-exhaust your abdominals with heavy work and then force them to overload with heavy partial or full-range whole body exercises? Your abdominals will very quickly become much stronger than they were. Stronger abs is the big key to success in almost every athletic discipline.

Speed/agility pre-exhaustion. Generally speaking, speed is something that is best to work on while you’re fresh. Whether you’re talking about running speed or hand speed, lifting speed, etc. However, in most athletic situations you need to be fast not just at the beginning of a contest, but all the way to the end. And I believe that speed can be trained with pre-exhaustion. Think of it this way. If you spend half your time doing a normal speed-first workout and for example you run a 40 yard dash in 4.9 seconds doing all the things necessary for working on foot speed (running technique, fast starts, flexibility, strength, etc.), then begin doing a pre-exhaustion workout where you train strength and endurance first and then finish with speed training. When you begin that workout let’s say that you run a 6.0 forty, but over the course of a month you adapt and your ability becomes better and you can now complete that workout and run a 5.1 forty. I think that with a short period of adaptation you would come out with an ultimately faster fresh 40 yard dash as well as the ability to hold your speed for longer under more adverse conditions. The same could be said for physical agility as well as for general body speed which would be applicable to martial arts.

So there you have it friends. Lots of different ways to spice up your training, different ways to throw in a little essence and yell, “BAM!” (Little Emeril joke). But serious food for thought on a productive technique and the completeness of your training. That’s what we’re striving for. We don’t want to just give you one card to play. We want you to hold all the cards and hold them at the beginning and the end of the match. That is the way to athletic greatness. Serious training in every aspect and balancing them so that you achieve them all. We’re leading the way in that realm and telling you the absolute truth about how to get it.

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