70 days. 70 Days until we take it out of neutral and see what we are made of. I want to make sure I run through some of the basic philosophies with you guys before those 70 days are up. Today we will be talking about pre-exhaustion.

How does muscle grow and become stronger?  This question has a multi-part answer, but for the sake of expediency, I am going to give the bare bones here. Firstly, muscles only grow and become stronger when they have to. If a muscle has a capacity for X work and you do X or less work over and over again you give the muscle no reason to grow.

What we put our bodies through is no joking matter. Don’t just go in and lift things, understand that we are hunting trauma.

Because of this you need to constantly overload your muscles if you want them to grow and become stronger. Everyone CAN grow muscle but it is only possible through necessity and so me must create that necessity.

The second part of the answer is a little trickier. Muscle grows by repairing damaged muscle fibers through a cellular process where torn muscle fibers are fused together to form new muscle protein strands called myofibrals. Repaired myofibrils increase in thickness and in number from the former torn muscle fiber. This process is what we call hypertrophy. Hypertrophy is the name of the game in the bodybuilding world. Hypertrophy occurs when the rate of muscle protein synthesis is greater than the rate of muscle protein breakdown. Keep in mind…this does not happen in the gym. You do the damage in the gym. This happens when you are resting.

When you rest after a hard gym session you have satellite cells that come in and act like stem cells for muscles. When activated, they help to add nuclei to muscle cells and contribute directly to the growth of myofibrils.

The underpinning cause of muscle overload and hypertrophy is the ability to stress the muscle…otherwise known as moving that iron. Muscle stress is the biggest component involved in the growth of muscle and ends the homeostatic state that an unmotivated muscle is in. Muscle stress is caused by three major things:

ISYMFS When CT Tells you to grow you fuckin’ grow

1. Muscle Tension. In order to produce muscle tension you have to apply a load of stress greater than what your body has previously adapted to. The main way to do this is to lift increasingly heavier weight for large numbers of reps. The added tension and exhaustion changes the chemistry of the muscle allowing for growth factors including mTOR activation and satellite cell activation
2. Muscle Damage. Localized muscle damage from working out is incredibly important. This muscle damage releases inflammatory molecules and immune system cells to heal you which active satellite cells and cause your hypertrophic state.
3. Metabolic Stress. Metabolic stress is what we call “the pump.” Metabolic stress causes cell swelling around the muscle which contributes to muscle growth (though not necessarily increasing muscle cell size). This happens due to the addition of muscle glycogen which helps swell the muscle along with the connective tissue growth. This growth is called sacoplasmic hypertrophy and is one way that people get the look of large and well defined muscles.
   

So now that we have reviewed what causes the muscles to grow, get stronger and become more defined lets go back to pre-exhaustion. The simple fact of the matter is that the human body is an incredibly efficient machine. This is why you can’t just go in and do the same workout all the time and get the same results. The body becomes good at doing whatever work (or lack of work you lazy fucks) you throw at it. Because of this we need to constantly find new and creative ways to attack our muscles and pre-exhaustion is a tried and true method dating back to the golden age of bodybuilding.

If It Was Easy Everyone Would Do It. Are you ready to be more?

Pre-exhaustion is exactly what it sounds like. You exhaust your muscle prior to your major workout. In a nutshell what you do to pre-exhaust your body is to do an isolation exercise prior to your larger compound exercise. The isolation should be aimed at one of the stabilizer muscles for the major compound. My favorite of these is to pre-exhaust the triceps prior to blasting the pecs.

When you do a bench press with either the bar or dumbbells your triceps hold a lot of the weight. However, if you exhaust the triceps prior to doing your bench presses, the weight you are using requires the pecs to shoulder the load that the triceps can’t because they have just been banged out.

Some basic mix and match isolation to compound per body part would look like this

CHEST: Isolation: Flat and incline dumbbell flys, machine and pec deck flys, low, mid and high pulley cable crossovers, triceps kickbacks or dumbbell triceps raises. Compound: Flat, Incline and Decline barbell and dumbbell presses, floor presses and parallel bar dips

BACK: Isolation: Dumbbell and barbell pullovers, straight bar and rope straight arm pull downs, machine pull overs, ab wheel roll outs and back extensions. Compound: Wide,medium or narrow grip pull-ups, barbell and dumbbell rows, Deadlifts

QUADS: Isolation: Leg extensions (machine, bands or cables) Compound: Barbell squats, leg presses, barbell lunches, Bulgarian split-squats, box jumps and hack squats

HAMSTRINGS: Isolation Barbell and Dumbell straight leg deadlifts, lying, seated or standing leg curls, ball floor leg curls Compound: Forward, reverse and walking lunges, weighted step-ups, leg press (feet in high plate position)

SHOULDERS: Isolation: Front, side and rear dumbbell or cable lat raises, machine delt flyes Compound: Dumbbell or Barbell shoulder presses, dumbbell or barbell upright row, cable upright row, cable face pulls, hang cleans, push presses, handstand pushups.

If you are ever looking for a good challenge on a body part that you are a hard gainer on pick one or two isolation lifts and match them with one compound and do 5×12. My favorite is the following giant set

Laying Dumbbell Chest Flyes

x

Seated DB Triceps Extension

x

Flat Barbell Benchpress

Hit this at 5×12-16 @9.5 RPE and tell me how your pecs feel after!

One thing I would like to point your attention to are two studies that argue that pre-exhaustion is not an effective method of training. One of the studies is a 2007 study out of Brazil in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning research and another a 2003 study from Swedish researchers where researchers tested the activity of muscles on bodybuilders after doing compound movements on major groups alone and then tested the muscle activity on those muscles after the compound lifts were done after a pre-exhaustion set.

Zane was a proponent of doing pre-exhaustion sets.

The findings in both studies were that the muscles were less active on compound lifts when a pre-exhaustion set of isolation lifts had been done prior to the compound lift. Because of this, both the Brazilian and Swedish researchers concluded that pre-exhaustion was not effective.

Both of these studies fail for the same reason. To paraphrase General Patton, The bilious bastards who did those studies about pre-exhaustion not being effective don’t know anything more about real bodybuilding than they do about fornicating.

That they found that the muscle had less activity after a pre-exhaustion set is not surprising. I don’t know what the word “exhaustion” means in Portuguese or Swedish, but my understanding of it includes the concept that the thing which has been exhausted, in this case the muscle, will be less active. I am able to come to that conclusion without a grant. What I also know is that less active is exactly the fucking point. This is where we lock our mind into our lift and push through the pain and exhaustion and this is what allows us to overload our muscles, create tears in the protein fibers, activate our satellite cells and cause muscle hypertrophy.

Nothing like this guy telling you what doesn’t work when it comes to bodybuilding. Thanks doc. Now cash your check and let me get back to work.

However, if you want to take matters into your own hands I suggest you give it a shot. Pick a day and go in and hit a major muscle group with all big compound lifts. Let’s say chest. Go in and do your inclines and declines and flat bench presses. Then after you are done go do some isolation work like flyes. Write notes after your workout and notes on how you feel the next day.

Then on the same day the next week go do the giant set i have listed above and another superset or two mixing and matching isolation to compound. Make sure you do the same number of reps on both workouts so you know you are only varying the style. Take notes again and compare. Go on…see if WB is crazy. In the meantime, be wary of a bunch of egg heads who get grant money to sit in a lab and afterwards come out and tell you that the things that Zane and Arnold were doing in the 70’s don’t help build muscle.

70 more days guys. It seems like a lot, but it’s going to go fast. Tick, Tock.