If your program's broke - fix it.
Many viewers of my 1 year like Mike video pointed out that I didn’t actually train ‘like Mike’. They're right! Of course I didn’t run some person’s cookie cutter program for a whole year with no changes. That's a recipe for stagnation.
Rather, I took inspiration from his Ideal Routine, changed the exercises to fit my goals, and as the months of training passed, I made several tweaks to suit my needs and preferences.
Today we'll focus on the first major technique of Mike's I abandoned, and what I now do instead.
Pre-exhaustion
In Mike’s Ideal Routine - he utilizes pre exhaustion sets for a few exercises. I used dumbbell flys to pre-exhaust my pecs for ring dips dips, and dumbbell pullovers to pre-exhaust the lats for pull ups.
With compound exercises, involving multiple muscles, your weakest link will give out first. So when you reach failure in dips, it could be because your triceps failed, but your chest still some juice left. Pre-exhaustion aims to isolate one muscle before a compound exercise, such that the compound exercise leaves all relevant muscles fully taxed.
Logically, this makes sense as a solution to that problem.. And the pump you get is insane - it's definitely worth trying sometime.
My beef with this is very pragmatic:
When you do a pre-exhaustion set (to failure) and then your main exercise, it interferes with progressive overload in that main exercise. I would end up progressing the dumbbell flys, but not the dips would progress more slowly. The following session, my newfound pec strength would just get used up next session by the flys, and I’d still be just as weak on the dips as I was last time.
While I think you can still make progress in terms of muscular size doing this, I didn't like it for two reasons:
- To test your strength in the main lift, you’d have to program it separately, without the pre exhaustion, to see where you’re actually at in a ‘normal' level of fatigue. But this interferes with the minimal training plan itself. I don't want to have to manipulate my programming to know how strong I am. I want that as part of the plan. I’d rather just have the regular working set in my plan be the measure of my strength. Those 6RM, 10RM, or 12RMs that I'm progressing weekly.
- Motivation. When I’m doing dips as a primary movement - I want to actually get stronger in that movement. If I'm programming flys in order to make my dip training more effective, but that results in doing less intensity on the dips themselves - it’s just not that motivating for me.
Part of my ability to continue training week after week and be consistently stoked about it is seeing my continual progress in the training log. I did not like how much slower my dips and pull ups improved (in the context of my training) compared to the other exercises without pre-exhaustion sets.
So what do I do instead?
I just separate the pre-exhaustion exercises and treat them as their own exercise. For dumbbell pullovers, I perform them after pull ups, so that they don't interfere with my performance in pull ups. And I do them after a proper rest, with a push exercise in between.
For dumbbell chest flys - I replaced those with incline presses because I just prefer them. Again, I take a proper rest after this exercise, do a pulling movement, and then hit the dips with full gusto.
This simple change of emphasis has me progressing faster in the main lifts that are of higher priority to me, and keeps me more motivated to keep up the hard work!
I'd encourage you to think critically about any training plan you're following. Understand why you're doing things a certain way, and don't hesitate to tweak the details to see if you can improve upon it. There's no such thing as a perfect plan - our needs and desires are constantly changing. A wise trainee knows how to adapt.
Next week we'll focus on another controversial topic: the optimal number of sets.
I hope you eat a lot of turkey this weekend! Happy Thanksgiving to all!
-John
P.S. Need help getting unstuck in your fitness journey?
