Unusual Use of Classic Technique

Now we all know I’m not a bodybuilder at least not in the modern sense. I espouse almost all the facets of old-time physical culture and I like the idea of having large, thoroughly developed functional muscles, but the looking pretty and standing around in pink underwear ain’t happening. However I think you can learn from a lot of different places and you ought to be able to recognize a smart technique even if it isn’t being used by the smartest group to ever come down the pike. So today we’ll take a small page out of an old bodybuilder technique.

PRE-EXHAUSTION

Those of you who are newer might not be completely familiar with what that is. I’ll put it in a nutshell for you. It’s the idea of using an exercise that particularly targets one muscle to fatigue that specific muscle and then applying a larger more compound or muscle group-based exercise to push the “exhausted muscle,” into further development by training it harder than usual. “Huh??”

Okay, let me make it a little more clear. A classic bodybuilder pre-exhaustion set up might be to do dumbbell flies immediately before bench presses. What this does is take an exercise that targets the chest muscles specifically, but doesn’t really tax the other connected muscles of the upper body. Then you take the compound exercise, the bench press and take advantage of the fact that your shoulders, triceps and other accessory muscles that drive the bench press are still fresh, but the chest muscles are already fatigued. So you then force them to work harder than usual in the basic exercise and use the fresh muscles to push the chest muscle to new levels of stress therefore development. By the way, a question we often get is, “How do I build a bigger chest?” or “I’m bench pressing, but my pecks aren’t developing. How do I fix that?” This is an excellent way. It’s simple, doesn’t require a whole lot of time and can reap big benefits for strength and development of the chest.

This was a popular technique in the 60’s and 70’s with the high-intensity crowd. They developed entire routines that took advantage of pre-exhaustion and were very successful with building big, strong muscles with it. In my formative years I experimented with and got good gains out of this type of training. Another side benefit is that it’s tough and it helps make you tough. You can come up with your own combinations, but you can basically work any muscle in a pre-exhausted manner. The classic way to apply this is to do a super set. Meaning you do the first “pre-exhaustion” exercise and then immediately with no rest go to the next exercise. I believe there are however several ways to apply a variation of this technique to work on building higher level function of the muscles and working on different pathways of strength and development.

For today I’m going to just give you couple of pairings for working specific muscles in case you’re interested in being ridiculously massive. I also found that the first time you do this technique your strength takes quite a hit. But after you work it for a couple of weeks you get a massive jump in what you can handle In your second compound exercise and then when you resume regular training you get a corresponding jump into new maxes for your regular big movements. It’s also a great way to develop a feel for exactly which muscles are working at what points in a particular lift.

The better this feel is and the better you can activate the muscles through a particular lift the higher your max will be. (Read Bryce Lane’s new article on our site for more in-depth thought on how to activate a muscle in a particular lift. Great article!)

Here are the pairings:

Biceps (barbell curl/ bent over row)
Triceps (tricep extensions/overhead presses)
Chest (dumbbell fly/dips)
Upper back (pull overs/chins or rows)
Quads (leg extensions/squats)
Ham strings (leg curls/stiff leg or single leg deadlifts)
Low back (back extensions/deadlifts)
Traps (shrugs/cleans)
Shoulders (lateral raises/presses)
Forearms (wrist curls/regular curls)

As you can see this is a basic bodybuilder pairing with exercises that I generally don’t use because they are machine based. You can however do basically all of them without machines if you’re creative or willing to work on alternative methods to doing these exercises. Now that you have a basic grasp on how this works, tomorrow we’ll look at ways to twist it into really intense training that works on different levels of conditioning and more functional movements. Things like pre-exhausting your grip, your abdominals, your strength, your conditioning, a weak link in the chain, and high-rep pre-exhaustion. Ya know… the fun stuff.