For those of you who have been working out for a while now, you might be finding that you're no longer progressing to the next level. Well if you would like to change that and are open to suggestion then read below about the pre-fatigue principle.
By: Shannon Clark
For those of you who have been working out for a while now you might be finding that you're no longer progressing to the next level and are having a hard time staying motivated to keep up with your training.
This is a common occurrence among regular exercisers as their body adapts to the stimulus you are placing upon it and no longer sees the need to grow stronger. It is during these times that we need to come up with a way to shock our body, provide a new and challenging stimulus to place upon it and get it responding again. Applying the principle of pre-fatigue may just be the answer you are looking for.
Taking Your Workout To The Next Level
Incorporating The Principle Of Pre-fatigue
In most weight training programs, you begin with large compound muscle movements that call into play major muscles groups along with some stabilizers and work your way towards more concentrated movements to really target a specific muscle. This allows you to lift the heaviest weight possible on the major lifts since you are fresh and ready to go.
Pre-fatigue is basically doing the exact opposite. What you do here is begin with a small isolated movement to fatigue a particular muscle group that may be stronger than the assisting muscle groups.
Often, when we are performing a compound exercise, many muscles are called into action. Take the military press for example. This action targets the deltoid muscles, as well as the tricep muscles.
Military Press.
Now, you may have very strong deltoid muscles but may be lacking in your tricep strength, so when performing a military press, you may push as much weight as your triceps can handle, however, more than likely if they were stronger you could handle more weight since your deltoid muscles are still quite a bit stronger than the triceps.
To solve this problem, you would first begin with an exercise that strictly concentrates on the deltoid muscles. By doing this, you fatigue your deltoids slightly, so then when you go to do your military presses, your deltoids and triceps now have the same relative strength. This way, when you choose your max weight for your military press, it will be a weight that will be challenging for both your tricep muscles and your deltoid muscles.
Pec Flyes (Butterfly).
Perfect For Isolating The Chest Before Moving
Into A Compound Exercise..
Don't Completely Fatigue
One consideration with this training method however is that you must be sure not to completely fatigue your muscles on the first isolated exercise. If you do this, you won't have any strength and energy left to complete the more compound exercise and could set yourself up for injury.
Precaution
Precaution should also be taken as this is a more intense type of training and without proper program planning could lead to overtraining. For example, if you normally don't work your triceps with your chest, you need to ensure that you have sufficient rest after working your triceps before going to chest as the triceps are an assisting muscle to most chest exercises.
If your triceps are still not fully recovered from their previous workout, you will be digging yourself into a deeper hole since in most people, their chest muscles can lift much more weight than their tricep muscles, therefore pre-fatiguing the chest to a point where they are only as strong as your triceps, which have not fully recovered would be a very difficult task to achieve.
