is it wise to prefatigue my fingers before posting, or should I get drunk and stoned then post?
I want to make sure I’m using my brain before firing off 20 stupid posts
Brb gonna go do some biceps curls to make sure I can row with less weight cause my biceps will give out first yay
Now I do somewhat understand the logic of PX but its so damned messed up as he doesnt seem to care wether the muscle you want to focus on is a “big” muscle group or a weak ass one
Aka I would probably actually want to pre fatigue my chest if I was going to do some close grip bench press and wanted to use that movement to focus on triceps.
But…I would not pre fatigue my triceps if I was going to do bench press afterward to focus on my chest.
I wouldnt pre fatigure my biceps if I wanted to go do some rowing and focus on lats/traps/rhombo whatever the fuck.
But I would pre fatigure my back if I was weird and wanted to work my biceps using close grip chin ups
[quote]Subject_17 wrote:
…Really? Is everyone REALLY having that hard of time understanding X’s logic?
WOW.[/quote]
Seriously lol…
Dorian Yates must have been doing it wrong all those times he started his back sessions with pullover movements to isolate his lats before moving to pulldowns and heavy rows. He was also doing it wrong by starting quad sessions with leg extensions before moving onto leg press and hack squats.
So I have a problem feeling my hamstrings on RDLs instead of ‘pre exhausting’ my hams with leg curls I should go pump up my lower back by doing hyperextensions then move onto RDLs?
Did not read the entire thread.
My understanding of pre-fatigue.
I would do flys before benching to pre-fatigue my chest.
Reason:
When we use a muscle, not all muscle fibers are recruited to lift the load. If I pre-fatigue, I will tire out the muscle fibers that would normally lift the said load and my body would need to tap into muscle fibers it normally wouldn’t use (unless the muscle was already fatigued). New muscle fibers would be stimulated to grow, thus helping a bodypart get that much bigger.
[quote]DanielDJ wrote:
Dorian Yates must have been doing it wrong all those times he started his back sessions with pullover movements to isolate his lats before moving to pulldowns and heavy rows.[/quote]
Also when he did hamstring curls before RDL’s, concentration curls before barbell curls, and leg extensions before leg presses or Smith machine squats.
Ok…you do some skullcrushers before bench, your triceps are toasted pretty good. You move on to bench. Once you get to the point where your triceps reach failure (say, at 6 reps rather than 10 reps vs if you were fresh), X is saying that your chest will somehow take over the movement and keep going.
That’s exactly where I have to call shenanigans. You chest CAN’T complete the movement if your triceps are burned out, they are NEEDED for the movement to happen. You’ll get the bar about 2 inches off your chest on the 7th rep, and it’ll plop right back down. Good luck chesty.
It seems Professor X has made some gains with what he calls “pre-fatigue sets”, although the lifting world’a nomenclature definitely doesn’t agree with him.
No matter if I am 200, 300 or 400 lbs of solid muscle, calling for instance ‘drop sets’ ‘supersets’ is still needlessly confusing.
And even if we believe him (his gains could’ve been made for a myriad of other reasons), his idea of why his “personal approach of pre-fatiguing” worked is probably bro-science.
[quote]hungry4more wrote:
Ok…you do some skullcrushers before bench, your triceps are toasted pretty good. You move on to bench. Once you get to the point where your triceps reach failure (say, at 6 reps rather than 10 reps vs if you were fresh), X is saying that your chest will somehow take over the movement and keep going.
That’s exactly where I have to call shenanigans. You chest CAN’T complete the movement if your triceps are burned out, they are NEEDED for the movement to happen. You’ll get the bar about 2 inches off your chest on the 7th rep, and it’ll plop right back down. Good luck chesty. [/quote]
PRECISELY. As I said earlier, you cannot isolate a muscle during a compound movement; even if your chest is working a bit harder, it isn’t going to straighten your arms for you. As the poster below this one said, it’s bro-science.
prof x clearly doesnt understand this basic bodybuilding concept
Geiger, B. (2006). Pecs in reverse: pre-exhaust your chest by flip-flopping your routine. Everything will be backward except the results. Joe Weider’s Muscle & Fitness: 70+. Canadian Periodicals Index Quarterly.
EDIT: I’m trying to find actual studies (journal article) about it but am coming up empty thus far. Perhaps this phenomena is “broscience” itself(?).
Scrawny Newb here…
I just want to comment that this is the exact type of thread and discussion that I find most interesting on this website.
A brief summation of this thread for anyone new.
Professor X has got it WRONG. Everyone knows he is wrong. This was concluded on page 1.
The last 2 pages consist of Prof X subtly moving the focus of the discussion away from the fact that he was found wrong and arguing that his terminology might have been wrong but what he was saying is still essentially correct. So therefore he is STILL right.
I predict Professor X will ultimately ‘win’ this thread around page 8 by arguing the naysayers (those who are right) in to submission and thus, we will all have to change our definition of what we thought the pre-exhaust method was and frankly I’m looking forward to watching him do it.
GO PROF!!!
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My shoulders get heavily involved when I’m benching, so pre-fatiguing them means my chest has to pick up the slack when moving the same weight. That sort of pre-fatiguing, which PX is talking about, slightly reduces the involvement of a troublesome and over-involved assisting muscle in the movement, placing more stress on the target muscle and allowing better growth.
Pre-fatiguing as a lot of the posters here see it is doing a few isolation sets of the target muscle to firm-up the mind-muscle connection, and where the target muscle is the one that would ordinarily fail last it makes it work harder because it is already tired.
I think both strategies have merit.
[quote]hungry4more wrote:
Ok…you do some skullcrushers before bench, your triceps are toasted pretty good. You move on to bench. Once you get to the point where your triceps reach failure (say, at 6 reps rather than 10 reps vs if you were fresh), X is saying that your chest will somehow take over the movement and keep going.
That’s exactly where I have to call shenanigans. You chest CAN’T complete the movement if your triceps are burned out, they are NEEDED for the movement to happen. You’ll get the bar about 2 inches off your chest on the 7th rep, and it’ll plop right back down. Good luck chesty. [/quote]
If the triceps are worn down then the arms wont lock out on a pressing movement. That means if i do a DB press then i will be forced to stay in the ROM near the bottom or midrange of the movement.
That doesnt sound bad to me. I dont lock out reps on anything.Nothing will be lost by not locking out…
[quote]Fuzzyapple.Train wrote:
Geiger, B. (2006). Pecs in reverse: pre-exhaust your chest by flip-flopping your routine. Everything will be backward except the results. Joe Weider’s Muscle & Fitness: 70+. Canadian Periodicals Index Quarterly.
EDIT: I’m trying to find actual studies (journal article) about it but am coming up empty thus far. Perhaps this phenomena is “broscience” itself(?).[/quote]
I’ve wondered the same thing. I found the following article and would appreciate hearing comments from some of the seasoned guys here.
Bodybuilding Science
By Robbie Durand, M.A.
Exercise Pre-exhaustion for Muscle Growth: A Myth?
For years, exercise pre-exhaustion has been a staple of muscle growth for bodybuilders. In â??Pumping Iron,â?? Arnold routinely used leg extensions before moving into heavy squats. A number of bodybuilders have advocated pre-exhausting muscles for greater muscular growth. The premise of pre-exhaustion is that fatiguing a muscle with a single-joint exercise such as leg extensions or flyes, before a multi-joint exercise such as squats or bench presses, will lead to greater muscle recruitment.
Motor unit recruitment states that as a muscle is fatigued, a higher threshold of muscle fibers will be activated to compensate for the pre-fatigued muscle fibers. The pre-exhaustion method involves exercising the same muscle or muscle group to the point of muscular failure, using a single-joint exercise immediately before a multi-joint exercise.
A common exercise for pre-exhaustion is leg extensions, followed by squats or flyes before bench presses. Muscular Development leads the field in bringing bodybuilders the latest cutting-edge research on exercise science, so this study may come as a shockerâ?? because based on the research, pre-exhaustion may be just bullshit! A recent study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research questions how valid exercise pre-exhaustion is for muscle growth and strength.
Previous Research About Muscle Pre-exhaustion
Before we get into the newest research, I think itâ??s important to take a look at whatâ??s been done in the past. In a previous study, researchers examined the motor firing of the quadriceps and hamstrings by using a leg extension pre-exhaustion before performing leg presses. Contrary to what bodybuilders would expect, muscle pre-exhaustion with leg extensions before the leg press resulted in a decrease in muscle activity of the quadriceps muscle during the leg press, compared to no pre-exhaustion.1 Pre-exhaustion has been touted for many years to increase the number of fibers activated during an exerciseâ?? but the research showed it decreased fiber activation.
Another study reported similar findings. Researchers investigated the effect of pre-exhaustion on upper-body muscle activation during bench presses, and reported that training chest on the pec deck immediately before the bench press lead to similar muscle activation of anterior deltoid and pectoralis major muscles. However, they observed an increase in the triceps muscle activation, and the worst performance during the bench press exercise was with pre-exhaustion.2
Based on these two studies, pre-exhaustion leads to a decrease in muscle recruitment or no change in the actual muscle group performed during exerciseâ?? not an increase, as so many people once thought. Muscle growth is about keeping tension on the muscle. Any time there is a decrease in motor unit firing during exercise, tension is being taken off the muscle.
New Study: Pre-exhaustion Does Not Lead to Greater Muscle Activation
Scientists in Brazil got together to retest the validity of muscle pre-exhaustion before exercise. They took young men and they hooked electrodes all over their chests and triceps to measure muscle activation, and separated the men into two groups who performed different exercises.
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The pre-exhaustion group performed a set of flyes and immediately performed a bench press until failure.
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The control group only performed the bench press.
When the researchers measured muscle activation of the chest muscles after pre-exhaustion, they concluded that there was no greater activation of the chest muscle, but there was a greater activation of the triceps by 17.8 percent. So how come the triceps were activated more with a pre-exhaustion set before bench presses? Because the chest muscle was fatigued, it relied on activation of the triceps to move the weight. This research is in alignment with other studies where scientists reported a significant (33.67 percent) increase in triceps muscle activation during bench press exercises with pre-exhaustion.
The bottom line is that pre-exhaustion is not going to lead to greater muscle activation, but it will lead to greater activation of muscle groups because the muscle is pre-fatigued.3 These studies suggest that the pre-exhaustion method must be reconsidered for its effectiveness in enhancing strength and muscle size gains.
Additionally, muscular weakness induced by pre-exhaustion affected exercise formâ?? changed the pattern movementâ?? of the men who performed bench presses. This change in movement pattern requires caution, because limited ability to control movement is related to abnormal mechanical loads at joints. These abnormal lifting patterns may be a factor in injury during exercise.
References:
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Augustsson J, Thomee´ R and Karlsson J. Ability of a new functional deficits after anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction. Knee Surg Sports Traumatol Arthrosc, 12: 350-356, 2004.
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Gentil P, Oliveira E, Rocha Ju´nior VA, Carmo J and Bottaro, M. Effects of exercise order on upper-body muscle activation and exercise performance. J Strength Cond Res, 21: 1082-1086, 2007.
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Brennecke A, Guimarães TM, Leone R, Cadarci M, Mochizuki L, Simão R, Amadio AC, Serrão JC. Neuromuscular activity during bench press exercise performed with and without the preexhaustion method. J Strength Cond Res, 2009 Oct;23(7):1933-40.
[quote]Jason van Wyk wrote:
My shoulders get heavily involved when I’m benching, so pre-fatiguing them means my chest has to pick up the slack when moving the same weight. That sort of pre-fatiguing, which PX is talking about, slightly reduces the involvement of a troublesome and over-involved assisting muscle in the movement, placing more stress on the target muscle and allowing better growth.
Pre-fatiguing as a lot of the posters here see it is doing a few isolation sets of the target muscle to firm-up the mind-muscle connection, and where the target muscle is the one that would ordinarily fail last it makes it work harder because it is already tired.
I think both strategies have merit. [/quote]
Good post.
[quote]Jason van Wyk wrote:
My shoulders get heavily involved when I’m benching, so pre-fatiguing them means my chest has to pick up the slack when moving the same weight.
[/quote]
If you can bench 315x5 fresh there is no way you’ll be able to bench that much (weight/reps) if you pre fatigue your shoulders.
You would definitely have to drop the weight you bench because your shoulders, which you said are heavily involved and therefor are responsible for lifting a good portion of that weight, would be tired already.
You wouldn’t be able to move the same weight.
I think X is wrong just like most in this thread, but it seems like some of you guys are carrying around some previous butthurt baggage.