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Pre-Fatigue Sets: How To Perform Pre-Fatigue Sets During Workout Sessions

Topic: Fitness and ExercisePublished April 2, 2011

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One of the best ways to liven up your muscle mass building program and allow you to see better results is to add in some pre-fatigue work sets. Using the pre-fatigue principle is a great way to get your muscles tolerating a higher overall level of stress and being able to push through exhaustion. Many people make the mistake of going into the gym and performing the same workout session over and over again but by changing things up and using a concept such as the pre-fatigue concept, you're able to take your mass building to a whole new level. Let's take a look at how to perform these workout sets and how to incorporate these into your overall workout approach. What Pre-Fatigue Sets Are rnRight off the top you need to come to understand what these type of sets are. A pre-fatigue set is going to be where you perform an exercise for the smaller, helper muscle that assists when doing a major lift, and then immediately after that, go and perform that major lift. So for example, let's say you're training your chest. Since the triceps are definitely going to assist the chest when doing the bench press, your goal is to pre-exhaust the triceps so that they aren't as powerful when doing the bench press. This then means that there will be a much higher overall stress level placed on the chest muscles, taking their growth and development up a notch. So you would perform two to three sets of tricep extensions and then after that, go and perform your bench press as normal completing the pre-fatigue set-up. The Advantages Of Pre-Fatigue Sets rnSo what are the advantages to adding pre-fatigue sets to your mass building workout program? The first advantage is that it will help to bring up lagging muscle groups. If you can't get your chest to gain strength no matter what you try, this could be the ticket to pushing you past this plateau. Secondly, since these are a lot more intense in nature, you're going to cause the body to release more testosterone and growth hormone throughout the session, thus progressing your fat loss progress along. It's important that you are always looking for ways to up the overall intensity of any given workout as that is what allows you to move forward and pre-fatigue sets will do a very nice job of accomplishing this. Adding Pre-Fatigue Sets Into Your Workout Program rnSo now that you see what pre-fatigue sets are, how do you add them to your mass building program? The first thing to note is that you should never be doing these each and every workout session. Remember that they are much more intense and doing too many of them will cause burnout. Instead, try and add them in on one or two exercises when you feel your progress is stagnant and you need a push in the right direction. Also make sure that you don't add them in on all sets – just one or two exercises per workout will be sufficient. Lastly, remember that since the intensity of these is going up, you may notice that you can't perform quite as much overall volume in the workout you're using them with and this will be fine. It's normal to see a slight drop in total exertion ability as the CNS will be very fatigued from including these in the session. So there you have everything you need to know about pre-fatigue sets. When added to your mass building workout correctly, these definitely can be a great way to take your level of muscularity up a step.

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