You shouldn’t feel like your gym career is over when you hit your goals. There will be moments when everyone will reach a plateau, even grizzled six-day-per-week bodybuilders and trainees on three-day splits under a year of training. The key to breaking through is finding the right approach.
Your most significant muscle groups are healthy, but constantly focusing on compound exercises has exposed a vital weakness: your assistive muscles. You may have been hammering the same workout program too long, making you stuck. A fitness program that incorporates “pre-exhaustion training” is more likely to succeed if that’s the case.
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How Does Pre-Exhaustion Training Work?
A pre-exhaustion workout is a superset strategy, but you pair exercises targeting the same muscle group instead of targeting two different muscles. You first target the muscle with an isolation exercise, then with a compound exercise.
Examples include dumbbell fly or cable crossover before bench press or leg extension before squat. Thus, the set doesn’t end prematurely, and the adaptation stimulus for all those muscles isn’t compromised, so the target muscle doesn’t outlast the supporting ones.
Pre-Exhaustion Vs. Reality In Exercise
Several studies that discount the benefits of pre-exhaustion training suggest targeting a muscle first with an isolation exercise decreases its activity during subsequent compound exercises. But here’s the thing: That’s the point.
Pre-exhaustion training does not increase muscle growth by increasing activity in the target muscle; instead, it helps grow the strength and supporting muscles by evening the playing field and ensuring that all the muscles are worked to exhaustion. Performance outcomes should be secondary.
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Training For Pre-Exhaustion
It is exhausting, so you should limit it to just one or two muscle groups per workout with one or two supersets. If you are new to weightlifting or have less than a couple of years of experience, you run the risk of overtraining.
Nevertheless, pre-exhaustion training helps experienced lifters, who find it hard to gain size in big compound moves such as the squat, bench press, and deadlift.