Natural Bodybuilding, Fitness, and Peak Performance

"Muscle Building Techniques": should you use 'pre-exhaustion'?

Pre-exhaustion has long been one of many muscle building techniques used for intensifying the workload on a particular muscle. It's a tactic often used for improving a lagging body part when that particular muscle happens to be one that can be worked with a compound movement. In fact, the pre-exhaustion muscle building technique can only be used on just such a muscle group.

Compound movements are weight training exercises that resemble everyday natural bodily movements. These are squatting, pressing, and rowing movements. For example, behind-the-neck presses resemble the movement you make whenever lifting an object over head to set on a high shelf. Squats are what you do when pulling some weeds in your front yard. Bench pressing is basically what you do when you need to push away that belligerent drunk who tripped into you at a night club. And rowing movements are basically… well… what you do when out on a lake in a boat or trying to pull open a jammed door.

Muscle building techniques like 'pre-exhaustion' have long been used as weight training intensifyers.

Some bodybuilders believe the best way to build the chest, lats, shoulders, and legs are with the muscle building techniques of compound movements. The reasoning goes something like this: "You can use heavier weights doing compound exercises; therefore, you'll get bigger by focusing on them."

Well, one of the most intense muscle building techniques that this theory ignores is the pre-exhaustion technique. Pre-exhaustion simply entails performing an isolation exercise immediately prior to performing a compound movement which also hits the muscle that was isolated. So if you were working your chest, you'd do a set of dumbell flyes (isolation) and upon completing that set, you'd jump over to the bench press (compound) and knock out a set of that exercise.

Talk about "intensity"; the flyes will have effectively "pre-exhausted" the pectoral muscles so that the bench presses will feel as though they're isolating the pectorals rather than equally dividing that muscle's work with the triceps and deltoids. This results in more overall direct work for the pectorals. It's this ability to break down a muscle group faster that makes this muscle building technique so intense.

Pre-exhaustion is equally effective on the shoulders and quadriceps. You can follow side lateral raises (dumbell or nautilus) with a shoulder pressing movement. You can follow leg extensions with a leg press movement. I'd stay away from free-weight squats when using this muscle building technique for safety purposes.

Pre-exhaustion might be best reserved for lat exercises. Given that a lot of trainees tend to have trouble isolating their upper back, utilization of a Nautilus lat isolator followed by some pull-downs and rows might be just what gets them those "wings".

Although the arm muscles can be worked with pre-exhaustion (i.e. triceps extensions followed by close-grip bench press), it tends to be most effective on chest, quads, delts, and lats.

The big key to making this most unique of all muscle building techniques effective is to perform the compound movement immediately after the isolation exercise. Traditionally, there's no rest time between the two.

The other key is to use this muscle building technique sparingly. As with many such intensifiers, it can easily lead to overtraining. If using pre-exhaustion, pay very close attention to the targeted muscle's recuperation ability between workouts. If recovery begins to lag - cease and desist.

Then, try out the ultimate of synergistic muscle building techniques right here.

"Forced Reps": Natural Bodybuilding Gains Antagonist

I recently had a conversation in the gym with a woman who was once a fitness client of bodybuilder Paul Jean-Guillaume. She trained with him for years and got to know him personally.

For those of you who are not familiar with Paul, he's probably the only (truly) natural bodybuilder I know of who competed in the Mr. Olympia in the late '80s. He also won the 1986 IFBB World Amateur Championships in the middleweight division.

What makes me so sure about his claims of being natural? That's exactly the question I posed to my friend at the gym who is his former client. Her answer:

"Oh… I know he's always been natural. He's so health conscious, he was afraid to put any drug in his body. He refused to even use creatine."

"Forced Reps": Did avoiding them help build the impressive physique of natural bodybuilder Paul Jean Guillaume?

This extemporized disclosure, coupled with his relatively small size when standing beside the Mr. Olympia contenders of 1987, led me to the same conclusion; he probably never "juiced". Don't get me wrong - he had/has an impressive physique. But it possessed more of the attributes for what the late Vince Gironda termed "creating an illusion" rather than a lot of raw size.

Why should this matter? Well, in the abstract it doesn't; it's just conversational. But in the context of training techniques for gaining natural muscle, it means a lot. That's because I clearly remember the opinion of Paul-Jean-Guillaume on the topic of "forced reps" from an article I saw about his training many years ago:

"Taking your bodybuilding sets to failure is going too far", he confidently stated.

What? This was astonishing to me. In my twenties, I was a regular practitioner of "forced reps"; taking sets past failure with the assistance of a spotter. How could someone claim that pushing a muscle to failure is over training? It seemed like blasphemy of an implicit bodybuilding work ethic standard.

In fact, I initially wouldn't drop my practice of forced reps. I stubbornly held on - believing he had to be wrong even though his physique development held evidence that he was right.

Could one argue that Guillaume merely has good genetics and that's why his muscles grew from sets taken short of failure?

Oh… he definitely has great bodybuilding genetics. But experience has now shown me that the exact opposite is the case: you'd have to have super-human genetics to consistently gain muscle by applying forced reps.

His extraordinary genetics took him to elite level competition through sound training and eating habits. Applying those same sound habits (notably - dropping "force reps") can lead you and me to better natural physique development.

"Assessing Personal Values and Beliefs": Essential for Your Better Body

Well, they've done it again. They've published the findings of another one of those "rodent tests"; this one with the apparent intent of convincing millions of people that they could possess a gene that makes them lazy. That's right - a "laziness gene". The problem I have with the conclusions of such studies is their tendency to implicitly absolve us of personal responsibility.

Hmmm… at a certain time in my life, those close to me might have sworn a laziness gene was my affliction. Now those same people would likely assert the damned thing had mutated - into a formidable antagonist no-less. What was it that transformed me from a one-time couch potato to someone who you'd be hard struck to find even near a couch unless he's helping someone move it?

Try an answer that's counter-intuitive; a change in 'values and beliefs'. In fact, 'assessing personal values and beliefs' is one of the best first steps I can think of for firing up your mental power for getting in shape. It's only counter-intuitive to the extent that we don't understand the inextricable link between mind and body.

Making this shift is a subconscious mental change more than anything else.

Values are what's important to us and beliefs are what we think is possible for us.

We're not referring to moral values here, but the ones of a worldly rather than spiritual nature. They reside within our subconscious minds - ensconced within life contexts in hierarchies that, when combined with beliefs, create attitudes about those contexts. These attitudes help determine many of our behaviors.

Why is this important for fitness? Because assessing personal values and beliefs can be the first step toward enhancing them to fit your desires. If you desire a nice physique but have leisure time as too high a value, this could be a conflict that stops you from working out. Moreover, you could be mistaking 'laziness' for a simple disempowering alignment of values in this situation.

What about beliefs? These can be crippling to values as they can render them unrealized. If you strongly value having a nice physique yet don't have the belief in your physical prowess to make it happen, you might be stopped before ever getting started.  In fact, a strong value that's been unrealized due to stultifying limiting beliefs is too often the cause of unfulfilled dreams and unnecessary angst among many people.

Assessing personal values and beliefs is one thing, but what about changing them. Is it difficult to change them for the better? What about enhancing them for the purposes of fitness?

It's not difficult at all. In fact, we do both of these things throughout our lives without even thinking about it.

But that's a topic for another entry. Simply 'assessing personal values and beliefs', within physique enhancement or any other life context you want to improve, is enough to reveal the absurdity of some of that "rodent research" (click here for article).