— . While for most people for most of the time these intensifiers are going to
do more harm than good, occasional and very cautious use of them can give
your training a jolt that may help to keep your poundages progressive, and
growth happening. But if they do not help in at least one of these areas, they
are not assisting you. If in doubt, do not use them.Pre-exhaustion
. In pre-exhaustion, an isolation exercise is immediately followed by a com-
pound movement for the same target muscle. is is supposed to intensify
the stress on the muscle concerned and increase the growth stimulus. For
example, leg extensions would be followed immediately by squats or leg
presses. Some people promote this method with vigor, but it has serious
theoretical and practical shortcomings. Probably the most obvious theo-
retical shortcoming is that the maximum tension on the target muscle is
reduced.. Pushing any single set hard takes great effort and focus. To do two exercises
back to back with a high degree of effort is much harder to do. What hap-
pens, even with strongly motivated trainees, is that consciously or subcon-
sciously the isolation exercise is stopped short of being worked very hard.
Or, more likely, the compound exercise becomes a joke because the trainee
is wiped out from training hard on the isolation exercise and cannot push
hard on the multi-joint movement. A typical hard gainer will never get big
and strong from working hard on just isolation exercises, so it makes little
sense to perform pre-exhaustion sets when they result in the major exercises
being done with diminished intensity and poundages.. Rather than trying to do the near impossible of consistently training hard
on pre-exhaustion, concentrate on the more practical option of straight sets.
Getting straight sets done properly is difficult enough, without complicating
things.. And the irony in this (as with forced reps, negatives and drop sets) is that,
even if you can deliver the extreme level of intensity, it may not be necessary
to train like that in order to make gains. So even if you could deliver this sort
of intensity on a consistent basis, you could be knocking yourself out for no
benefit. Not only that, but you would be risking overtraining through train-
ing too hard.