Fitness #3

Three Quick Thoughts for the Third Month

1. Hands down, the best time to practice your technique in any lift is when you are tired. That’s when it’s the hardest to maintain even normal technique, let alone exemplary technique, so the increased focus and emphasis that you are putting in will be far more likely to carry over to your next session and have great residual effects. It also mimics conditions like when you are going heavy or just trying to pound out a couple more reps in that last set – your muscle memory during these periods of time translates quite well. When you have your technique down, it’s entirely possible that once your muscles give out, your technique can carry you through a couple more reps - and remembering to push through your heels and keep your chin high might be the difference between nailing that new squat max and failure.

2. Pre-exhaustion is a wonderful weapon to add to your arsenal when done correctly. Let’s put this into a concrete context: the bench press. The bench press has two main movers, the pectorals and triceps. Most people happen to be fairly triceps-dominant (unless you have extreme t-rex arms), so what happens is that the triceps compensate mightily for the chest and most of the force and subsequent muscle development goes to the triceps. That’s great if you’re a powerlifter, but most of us bench to hit our chests. In pre-exhaustion, you would do a fairly intense tricep exercise just before you do the bench press. That forces the pectorals to become the main movers (synergists) and will do wonders for your chest growth. So while there is logic to always doing compound, multiple muscle exercises early in the workout and saving your isolation muscle work for later, just put into consideration how this might fit in with your specific goals.

3. My best friend in the gym? My watch. He limits my time between sets, is a standard that lets me gauge how I’m doing in that workout relative to others, doesn’t let me cheat on timed exercises and intervals, makes sure my workouts are always intense and teaches me the value of every second in the gym and how to appreciate rest and make the most of it.