Hi guys,
Connor here from The Gym Carlow, this is something I’ve implemented into my training so see if this information can help you.
Warming up should be a staple in any workout you do but pre-exhausting may be something new to your training and the key to breaking through a plateau.
For example if you have a body part that is lacking or you need to bring up having the muscle exhausted before your heavy compound lift will force that area to work harder.
Let’s take a leg day for example and say you want to bring up your quads. Where as normally you may do one machine to warm up or go straight to squats or leg press as you feel moving more weight and doing it at the start would yield more results. Instead try doing an adductor movement to warm up the hips and grow the adductors ,as quad sweep is mainly genetic and if you want bigger legs then bigger adductors will see to that. Then move on to a hamstring isolation, this will warm up the backs of your knees and prime the hamstrings for the big lift. From there move on to a quad isolation, extensions would be an optimal choice for this and here we want to fully exhaust the quads, use things like drop sets, rest pause sets etc to get down to the last fibres. Now from this we move on to the squat or leg press, you won’t be as strong as going fresh but that’s compensated for because you’re going to be more engage the muscles more and going lighter will keep form better and save your CNS (Central Nervous System) from becoming too fatigued.
This can apply to every muscle group so give it a try if you want to see how it works for you and if you can bring up any lagging areas.
