That’s right
1 Like
I never saw it as that . To me a drop set or break down is the same exercise continuing by reducing the resistance without rest … beyond what you could do without dropping the resistance. Weight stacks set up in the front of you in machines really made a difference for this , instead of having to get out of the seat on older machines with the weight stack behind you. But Performance Pins took it even further … with zero rest between drops in resistance.
Pre Exhaust was always explained to me as exhausting a muscle with an isolation move and following up right away with a compound move , utilizing surrounding muscles to push that isolated muscle past what it could on it’s on it’s own in the exhausted state.
I love both methods but especially breakdowns / drops with the Performance Pins.
1 Like
Hi Tz,
I always recall Dr Ken Leistner (sadly no longer with us) saying about our muscles are so interwoven and interbound that its clear our muscles work in conjunction with one other. With that in mind, in the case of a pec deck flye, DB flye or cable crossover being used as a pre exhaustion exercise, the pecs will no doubt take the brunt of the work, but there will be a percentage front delt and triceps involvement. As to what percentage i cant say, but its to the degree whereby they’ll not be fresh. This is what i mean by pre exhaustion being a drop set “of sorts”.
Have to agree though, if drop sets / breakdown sets are your thing, preformance pins are a great wee invention.
Dr.Ken called the pec deck a BS exercise in talking about the amount of muscle it works. It was in response to a question. Asking Dr.Ken from what I think was hard gainer magazine.
I used to correspond with him over the years through email. The biggest takeaway was to find
four or five compound movements you can do and to them well.
1 Like
Thats pretty much where am at right now, in the last few weeks its some form of deadlift, OHP and row.
Now and then like today I’ll get coaxed into a loaded carry (yoke, farmers or zercher) and prowler push n pull met con workout. But thats it.
On my working sets, the deads and OHPs are in 1-3 rep range, always paused deadstart reps. Maximum overload but avoiding failure and too fatigue, training 4-5 days a week, mobility work everyday, brisk walks everyday. And am honest about it, ive been using small doses PEDs for a few years now.
Yeah, I see what you’re saying now. Dr. Ken was someone who’s stuff I read and re-read over and over for years. Loved his stuff . I met him once at a training seminar in NJ but only got to talk with him a few minutes as he was so in demand by all the others in attendance.
I also talked to Roger Swab at this Mainline Nautilus facility and he was very generous with his time and was a close friend to Leistner and Kevin Tolbert. When I questioned Roger about Dr. Ken’s out look on pre-exhaust, he flat out told me he knew Dr. Ken didn’t like it while he himself praised pre- exhaust. When I talked to Tolbert about it a couple weeks later , he laughed and also agreed Ken didn’t like it at all. But, and I was surprised with this, Kevin agreed with Roger and thought it was the way to go.
A few months after my meeting with Roger, Leistner had an article discussing Pre-Exhaust in his column in Muscular Development. He talked about what he didn’t like about it … which was just about a everything, LOL. One line I’ll always remember in the article, which was probably the first time I started to question Dr. Ken’s advice, was saying if you were squatting less than 500 lbs you had no reason to be pre-exhausting your quads with leg extensions or anything else.
Dr. Ken always insisted a ’ handful of basic compound movements’ and to just stay progressive with them was all anyone would ever need to reach their potential.
Maybe on paper …
1 Like
Similar to Dave, I could never progress on this despite hearing MM talk about clients making major gains on both lifts. I do wonder how accurate that was. For me, I would only now use it where equipment was limited.
2 Likes
There is more complexity to the problem of the pre-exhaustion depending on fiber type of muscles involved. In case of pushing muscles (chest, shoulders, triceps), see attached.
1 Like
Thanks Tz, would have to loved to have met him. Thanks for that.
I would agree with Dr ken with reagrds to what he said about the 500lb squats and PE. Training in a strongman gym, ive witnessed elite powerlifters and strongmen train, if see some squat 500, 600, 700lb for reps on a Monday, then later in the week preform leg extensions and leg curls at the end of a upper body workout. For stress management one told me.
Hi Boris,
This is how i used to think about PE, i.e., what if my triceps are more fast twitch and pecs are slow or medium twitch etc. But that was when my focus was on optimising the development of each muscle as best i could.
These days am not so interested, but thats besides the point.
Looking back, imo unless your willing to have a biopsy taken from each and every muscle group theres really no way of knowing for sure. Now i know theres ways of testing in the gym, i do recall Mike Lipowski had a few YT videos about fiber type testing.
Some time ago I posted the testing procedures to determine fiber type: the one recommended by AJ/Darden and another one by IART. I did those tests multiple times with various equipment in order to check myself and those tests never failed to confirm the conclusions which I made just watching how my different muscles reacted to various reps schemes. At least, on that points (that you can determine fiber type without biopsy and that you need to train in accordance with your fiber type) I fully agree with AJ. Although, Jones said several times that he knows for sure how fast-twitch muscles need to be trained, but he is not so sure how slow-twitch muscles should be trained. I speculate that he thought that slow-twitch muscles need more volume & frequency and not just higher rep count (15-20) in one all-out set.
1 Like
Id agreed, but of course theres many ways of achieving longer TULs as opposed to one all out high rep set. Im not convinced anymore that pre exhaustion is the best way to go about it, and as a few others pointed out, the progression already watered down MJ movement in many cases can suffer, particularly if progression has taken place on the single joint movement.
But if a SJ exercise is indeed better at targeting a specific muscle group, then that makes the MJ movement redundant. I believe you’d be better off just staying on the same SJ exercise and if its more TUL you looking for, then one way would be to immediately preform a drop set or two using preformance pins, or clusters, j reps, forced reps or whatever.
1 Like
Agree. I think that was also the reason why Arthur Jones focused on developing isolating machines vs compound machines.
1 Like
Maybe not the most scientific way around all of this but I’ll just just vary the different methods over a years training ; Zones, Pre-Ex, Break downs, Cluster Sets … why not use all these great ways of training at different times ?
But that’s just me … I’ve become tired of over thinking it. Whatever gives me a hard , satisfying workout that I’m enthused about is what I do. LOL, you guys are too smart for me 
3 Likes
Spot on. That’s exactly what I do. Variety is the key for me, both physiologically and psychologically.
1 Like
[quote=“tzabcan, post:298, topic:270883, full:true”]Whatever gives me a hard , satisfying workout that I’m enthused about is what I do. LOL, you guys are too smart for me
[/quote]
I had to reread that first part, thought i was on the wrong site again lol…
100% same here, inspite of strength for the most part being my main focus now, variation is still a must.
Ive seen guys in gyms for years using the exact same exercises, same split, same weights etc and they unsurprisingly they’ve not changed one bit. Instead some resorted to using ever increasing dosages and strengths of PEDs.
In the old nautilus routines from the 1980’s, pre-exhaust almost always seemed to be a SJ exercise followed by a compound. The explanation I remembered was that the SJ exercise was supposed to fatigue the prime mover in the following compound movement, such that “lesser” muscle groups would become more engaged. It has a certain logical appeal, but that logic may rest on a somewhat oversimplified picture of how muscles work.
In particular, it occurs to me now that if you successfully isolate and thoroughly fatigue a particular muscle group that was important in the MJ exercise, and then proceed to do the MJ exercise in a fatigued state, then you have probably changed the MJ exercise.
To be specific: Lets say you bench with a style that really fatigues the pecs. But now you prefatigue the pecs, and try to bench. If you keep exactly the same style, aren’t you just forced to perform the exercise at a lower weight, effectively changing it into a drop set? But instead, your body compensates and engages the triceps and delts more in order to limit the reduction in weight. That would successfully engage those other muscle groups to a greater extent. But aren’t you now doing a different kind of bench press? Maybe you’d be better off just using 2 variations on the bench: wide grip for pecs, narrow grip for delts and triceps. Or just use SJ exercises for all three muscle groups?
So I get the point: it might mainly be just another way to add volume and variation…
1 Like
I honestly think you are way over thinking it. Comes down to if it works for you. All the possible variations you mentioned could be valid… but the end point is does it work for you.
1 Like
Hi Al,
100%, after pre-fatigue the MJ movement is a definitely a horse of another colour.
Wide grip bench followed immediately by narrow grip bench? Think Pete Sisco refers to that as a compound set/reps, or a deadlift into a shrug etc. He says he’s clients have great results using that method.
SJ movements for all 3; Well as Arthur says here, he noted that we’re rotary animals, even when we move in a straight line we do so through a series of rotations. Not many (if any) pointed that out before AJs. Many have had great results on SJ nautilus machines too when the appropriate intensity was employed. So both variations works, a combo of both would probably be better than one exclusively
Let’s make this super simple take your current barbell bench press / chest press / hammer strength incline press i.e. your compound chest movement of choice for 8 reps. And add 200 pounds to that over the next 5 years it won’t matter if you did pre-exhaust, post-exhaust, super slow, 30-10-30 or whatever technique on top of that, your chest is going to be as big as it is ever going to get. As Dante Trudel said getting stronger in a moderate repetition range with adequate volume is the key to hypertrophy.
3 Likes