Prime your muscles with pre-exhaustion

Pre-exhaustion is a technique that will allow you to work your target muscles more effectively while reducing the impact on your musculoskeletal system.

Although we train every body part, there are always body parts that respond very well and others that lag behind. Honestly assessing the areas that need further development is crucial, and in this respect you can use techniques such as pre-exhaustion to address the issue.

Whether you are a bodybuilder, fitness athlete, or simply someone who wants to look good and stay in shape, a balanced physique is essential not only for aesthetics but also for the proper functioning of the body as a whole.

Balance and symmetry are terms we can use to describe how well or poorly the body flows in proportion from one body part to another.

If you are an intermediate athlete, after a while you will begin to notice your strengths and weak areas.

If you do not do something to build up lagging body parts, you will begin to develop an awkward appearance.

Therefore, you should strive for balance and body parts that are developed evenly in proportion to one another.

Pre-exhaustion: What is it for?

Many workout programs require you to start with a compound movement such as squats for the legs or bent-over rows for the back.

Because multiple muscles are needed to perform them, more joints will be working, but your motivation and nervous system will allow you to handle more weight.

However, the goal is not just to lift the greatest amount of weight, but to make the target muscle you want to develop do most of the work.

This requires establishing a strong mind-muscle connection;

• The best way to do this is to target the specific muscle you are trying to develop first.
• Sure, you may not be able to use as much weight, but by using pre-exhaustion, you benefit because a prepared muscle will do the work it needs to grow.

This technique is very effective for fatiguing and isolating the muscle, starting a session with single-joint exercises and then moving on to your multi-joint compound exercises.

During the multi-joint compound exercises for that body part, you will already be fatigued, allowing you to rely on the fresh secondary muscles involved in the movement.

Before discussing how it works, let’s break down the single-joint movements that can serve you for your compound movements; in one way or another, you will use the pre-exhaustion technique, depending on the muscle region you need to target.

Pre-exhaustion: How does it work?

The technique is easy to implement and, when used correctly, can produce surprising results, both for overall growth and for working on lagging muscles.

This is how it works:

• Step 1: Perform an isolation movement for a particular muscle group.
• Step 2: Immediately afterward, perform a compound movement for the same muscle.
• Step 3 would be «Get big… YES, it really is that simple…»

The thing is, normally, when you do the bench press, your triceps, deltoids, and other assisting muscles will reach failure before your chest muscles.

However, when you work your chest with an isolation movement such as the “flye,” your chest muscles will fail at the same time as, or even before, those assisting muscles once you begin bench pressing.

If you achieve pre-exhaustion, more muscle fibers work your target muscles and, as a result, they grow more.

More generally, the muscles will suffer significant damage due to the volume and load involved, producing metabolic stress as a result of the short rest periods and concentrated volume.

You will also create significant tension by selecting effective movements and using a moderate rep range, particularly with a compound exercise.

Pre-exhaustion: How do you incorporate it?

Now that you know that pre-exhaustion sets come first in your workout, what exercises should you use?

Well, although any movement that isolates the specific area you are trying to target would work, your best option is to use a machine movement that allows a full, controlled range of motion, enabling you to work one side at a time in the case of an upper- or lower-body joint.

You can work both sides if you wish, but if you have trouble feeling one side more than the other, or your weaker side is lagging, choose a unilateral movement and start with that weaker side.

For example;

• If you are training your back and have trouble feeling your lats working, you could opt for a one-arm pulldown.
• If your target muscles are the quadriceps or hamstrings, start with a curl or do a single-leg press.

As for sets and repetitions, you could do 3–4 sets of this first exercise and keep the repetition range at 6–12 reps.

Start with a lighter weight and focus on performing the repetitions a little more slowly as you establish that mind-muscle connection.

As you progress through these preparation sets, add weight and lower the repetitions with each successive set.

By the time you finish the last set, you should be mentally focused and physically prepared to take on the rest of your workout, and to do so you should use the best peri-workout supplements.

Pre-exhaustion: examples by muscle group

Here is a good breakdown of the isolation and compound movements for the main body parts.

Remember, to perform pre-exhaustion for a muscle group, you will do one or more of the isolation exercises described according to your needs:

• Legs: leg extensions, leg curls, and adductor exercises before working on an intense leg day with compound exercises such as squats, leg presses, hack squats, lunges, and/or deadlifts.
• Chest: pec deck, cable crossovers, dumbbell or cable flyes before doing compound exercises such as machine, barbell, or incline/decline dumbbell presses and/or dips.
• Back: pullovers and low-pulley pulldowns before working on your compound exercises, such as pull-ups, deadlifts, and/or behind-the-neck pulldowns or rows.
• Deltoids: lateral raises and front dumbbell raises before working on your compound exercises, such as shoulder presses or upright rows.
• Traps: shrugs, followed by cleans or close-grip upright rows.
• Triceps: push-downs and lying and seated extensions, followed by a close-grip press or triceps dips.
• Biceps: concentration curls, preacher curls, and incline curls, followed by barbell and dumbbell curls, including hammer curls.
• Calves: standing and seated calf raises on a machine, followed by calf presses on a leg press and donkey calf raises on a machine (at 90º).

If you try this for at least six weeks on your lagging muscles, you will definitely see a noticeable change.

With this improvement, your physique will acquire a much more pleasing appearance and will also function better as a whole.

Pre-exhaustion: what does the science say?

It is a technique that changes the typical exercise order so that you perform single-joint or isolation movements first, before compound or multi-joint exercises, with the goal of having the target muscle already fatigued.

Unfortunately, some research on pre-exhaustion was futile, so to speak, because the studies did not take into account that the technique was not designed to increase activity in the target muscles, but to increase fatigue in the target muscle.

The point is that not only is there rampant misinformation among many of the so-called fitness “experts,” but some training techniques are simply misunderstood.

A good example of this is pre-training, which a 1996 study showed develops more muscle than the standard training protocol, in which multi-joint exercises are performed first.

However, what a 2018 study says about the technique's potential to promote muscle hypertrophy is much more specific.

In this study, based on the available literature, the group of Brazilian scientists concluded that the technique does not increase neuromuscular activity in the target muscle during a multi-joint exercise, but it may improve activity in the accessory muscles.

From the standpoint of volume load, pre-exhaustion promotes a greater training volume load, mainly due to the increase in the number of repetitions performed in the isolation exercise, but it may reduce the volume load in the compound exercise.

In the context of the drive for muscle hypertrophy, there is no clarity; however, in what is called “bro science,” things are different, even as far back as 1970, when Arthur Jones pointed it out.

The practical application

When considering the design of a training program, there are two main variables to start with: volume and intensity.

• Volume refers to the number of repetitions you perform over a given period of time—a training session, a week, whatever.
• Intensity generally refers to the weight on the bar, usually expressed as a percentage of your one-repetition maximum. If you’re a beginner, you can probably focus solely on intensity, which you do by increasing the weight, but as you advance there are other variables.

At some point, you’ll no longer be able to walk into the gym and lift 2–3 kg more than last time, at least not for the same number of repetitions and sets.

At that point, you’ll also need to manipulate your training volume by using some type of periodized training.

With this setup, over time, you’ll start with a high training volume and relatively lower intensity, and slowly progress to using less volume and more intensity, which will help you gain more strength in the long term.

Regardless of your goals, these two setups should make up the vast majority of your training for at least the first few years of serious progress.

At some point, however, you’ll need to be more specific, which includes working on your symmetry, frequency, the way you grip the weight, angles, and other variables that would allow you to progress.

This is where pre-exhaustion comes in: it is a very useful tool for reducing the risk of injury, adding variety, and stimulating muscle growth, especially for intermediate and advanced trainees.

When you can no longer add more weight to the bar or need to work your lagging muscles, you’ll have to find other ways to overload your muscles.

A clear example for everyone

This technique was popularized by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the film Pumping Iron; if you watched it, you’ll remember Arnold performing leg extensions before squats.

Arnold reminded us of this during his visits to Spain: “when you fatigue the primary mover muscle with an isolation exercise before a heavier compound movement, it will lead to greater muscle fiber recruitment because muscular fatigue will set in before neurological fatigue.”

When Jay Cutler won his fourth Mr. Olympia, he spoke to the MASmusculo Team in Las Vegas about pre-exhaustion.

He told us this on that occasion;

• “You know, the squat was always my number-one exercise when I was younger, but as I grew older, I began to find it a little too heavy.”
• “When I was squatting 350 kg, I reached a point where I felt I didn’t need to squat 350 kg.”
• “I felt a little self-conscious about putting four plates on each side in the gym in front of everyone, but I didn’t have to work that heavy.”

Well, when he won his fourth Mr. Olympia, he did not squat more than 200 kg; he also performed sets of 12 or 15 repetitions.

When your ultimate goal was to add muscle tissue and become very strong, feeding your ego by showing that you lift heavy in the gym was not worthwhile.

Raúl Carrasco, the best IFBB Pro in the Iberian Peninsula, also gives us clear examples of how to apply pre-exhaustion to take your results to the next level.

Conclusions

In short, pre-exhaustion is useful when:

• If you are in the middle of an off-season and want to avoid the physical and mental wear caused by heavy weights.
• If you are returning to training after an injury and want to distribute your loads a little more evenly among muscle groups.
• When you need some variety to maintain interest in your program and want to maintain or grow your muscles.
• When you are fine-tuning your symmetry.

Compound movements require a much greater degree of neuromuscular activity than single-joint movements.

In our view, you’ll get the best of both worlds by occasionally incorporating a workout with pre-exhaustion.

This will allow you to recruit more muscle fibers, ultimately leading to greater muscle growth.

For advanced trainees, it is more joint-friendly while creating an anabolic environment to stimulate hypertrophy. This anabolic environment will also require additional nutritional support.