A Simple Technique for More Muscle Mass

By: Gregg Gillies

Contantly pounding your body with heavy weights and low reps can
take it's toll on you, both physically and mentally. Squats may
be the most beneficial weight lifitng exercise you can do.
However, putting hundreds of pounds on your back workout after
workout, always trying to better your performance, can kill your
motivation.

The same goes for any of the best exercises - deadlifts, bench
press, shoulder press, stiff-legged deadlift, etc. So what do
you do to increase your muscle mass when you find yourself
grinding down on the most important exercises?

A technique that I use to break out of a rut, and one that will
kickstart your motivation and new muscle mass growth, is plain
old vanilla pre-exhaustion. Sure, it's been around a long time
but how many people do you see use it consistently? And why
should they? Because it flat out works!

For those of you that may not be familiar with the technique,
pre-exhaustion works like this. It's nothing more than a
superset, which is performing two different exercises back to
back with no rest in between. However, the selection and order
of the two exercises is specific to pre-exhaustion. While you
could superset bent over barbell rows and bench presses, that's
not a pre-exhaust set.

Pre-exhaustion involves using a single-joint (or isolation)
exercise, followed immediately by a multi-joint (or compound)
exercise that works the same muscle group.

So what's the point of pre-exhaustion and how can you use it
effectively to break out of a rut and build more muscle mass?

The pre-exhaustion technique is beneficial in a few ways. First
of all, it increases your level of intensity. How does it do
this? By allowing you to perform more work in less time. And we
know that increasing your intensity level over time leads to
more muscle gain.

The pre-exhaustion technique also allows you to pre-fatigue a
muscle group, thus possibly bypassing a weak link in a specific
exercise, which again allows you to increase the intensity of an
exercise.

For example, for many people their weak link on the bench press
is their triceps. Unless you're naturally barrel chested, a good
portion of the rep on the bench press is performed by the
tricep. By utilizing an isolation movement first, like the pec
deck or cable crossover, you fatigue the pec muscles. This
allows the fresh triceps to help fatigue the pecs even more on
the next exercise, the bench press.

This technique can also help you mentally by giving you a break
from the huge poundaged on the compound movements. How does it
do that? Obviously, you have to lighten the load on the compound
movements when you do them right after a set of the isolation
exercise.

Another variation of the technique is to continue to perform
straight sets but do so in a certain order. For example, you may
perform three straight sets of 10 reps on the pec deck and then
move on to your three sets of the bench press. You may even want
to use both in different periods of time. Or experiment with
both pre-exhuast technique to see which one you prefer.

Either way, you'll get a fresh workout that can help you break
through ruts and start building muscle mass again.

About the author:
Gregg Gillies is the founder of Build Lean
Muscle.com His articles have appeared in Ironman Magazine.
He has written two books and is a regular contributor to Body
Talk Magazine. You can grab a free copy of his special report
Fast Mass!, available at his site.