In lifting, as in life, there are rules. You don’t take a laxative and a sleeping pill on the same night. You don’t get smashed around fuck face friends and leave your shoes on. You also don’t lift isolation movements before compound movements.
It’s time we break one of those rules, bros. Go get your Ambien and Ex-lax.
What is pre-exhaustion training, and why should you use it?
To first understand pre-exhaustion training, you need to understand conventional lifting wisdom. To put it simply, it goes like this:
The most effective workouts go in order of high stress, multi joint/compound movements first. After these lifts have been completed, then lower stress, single joint/isolation lifts come into play.
To see this in action, think about a program that involves squats and then follows those later in the workout with leg extensions.
Or pull-ups, and later on in the workout you’re doing bicep curls.
This type of training is popular because, well, it works. Especially for beginners and newbies in the gym. After a certain point though, you become accustomed the normal stressors you place on yourself in the gym, and you need something to get past those.
This is where continually adding weight, performing drop sets, super sets, or other advanced tactics work. Now we’re giving you another tool, pre-exhaustion sets.
Pre exhaustion sets break the conventional rules by flipping around the order of normal workouts. You do the compound lifts, which were already more exhausting, at the end of a workout when you’re even more fatigued.
A perfect example would be doing 3×15, or 3 sets of 15 reps, on the leg extension and leg curl and THEN going to perform your squats and deadlifts.
Here’s the big kicker about pre-exhaustion:
The compound work doesn’t change. You’re not supposed to be using less weight, fewer sets, fewer reps, or any other pussification strategy. You’d be doing the exact same protocol as if that was at the beginning of your workout.
Why do these work?
When doing multi joint movements like squats and deadlifts much of the fatigue that we accumulate isn’t physical, but neurological. These compound movements require a ton of neurological energy, especially as we start getting near our maximal load.
For some perspective, it can actually take weeks for someone to experience full neurological recovery after pulling a max deadlift. This is the same reason why sometimes after a heavy deadlift or squat day, you’ll be yawning as you walk out of the gym, even if it’s the middle of the day.
By switching the order and performing single joint movements first, you’re forcing the body to work in a way it’s not used to. Suddenly those muscles are experiencing levels of physical fatigue, but are more or less neurologically fresh.
In the leg extension/squat example your quads have now been forced to work in an isolated manner. They’ve been depleted of energy stores, suffered some micro trauma, and experienced some level of physical fatigue.
After that, they’re forced to work in a far more stressful manner by squatting like you would normally squat. All of the sudden your quads are undergoing a stimulus like they’ve never really experienced. They’re exposed to more stress, more physical fatigue, and more muscular damage.
This means they compensate by ramping up their rate of adaptation, or in other words, getting bigger and stronger.
Pre-exhaustion can be done with any body part.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a lagging chest, limp noodle arms, or chicken legs. If you’re no longer a beginner in the gym, pre exhaustion techniques can be used to help you bust through plateaus.
You could start doing flyes before benching. Tricep pushdowns before dips or benching, curls before pull-ups or rows, or glute ham raises before deadlifts.
The options are limitless. The important thing to keep in mind is that you shouldn’t be married to any one particular way of training. Everything is a tool that you use at various points to help you get past various plateaus. Pre-exhaustion is one of those tools.
Think of pre-exhaustion as your grappling hook on the Batman utility belt of getting jacked. Now go climb some motherfucking buildings, bros.