Pre-exhaustion has been hailed as a super solution for adding muscle mass. If you can’t get big doing heavy straight sets, then pre-ex is the answer (or is it?). It supposedly removes the “weak link,” allowing you to hit the target muscle much harder. The reasoning goes like this: When you train chest with bench presses, your smaller triceps give out first, leaving your stronger pecs under taxed. The pre-ex solution: Do cable crossovers first to prefatigue your pecs, then immediately run over to the bench press and rep out. With almost zero rest between the two exercises, your triceps and pec strength will be equal, and you can train your pecs much harder without weak-link interference.

Man, that looks great on paper (which is why we’ve tried it a number of times; our results in a moment). In fact, it looks so good that Arthur Jones built many of his Nautilus machines around pre-exhaustion. He had a leg extension/leg press unit, a pec flye/chest press unit and a pullover/pulldown unit to name a few. You were supposed to move from the isolation exercise to the compound movement with zero rest. The problem is, it just didn’t work for most people. (How many Nautilus gyms do you see these days?) The reason? Fatigue!

Think about it: When you do that first set of cable crossovers to failure, you saturate your pecs with fatigue products, like lactic acid, without training a lot of fast-twitch fibers (isolation exercises are inferior in that regard to multijoint movements). If you do a set of bench presses immediately after that, your pecs will not only be weaker—you have to use less weight than if you did bench presses first—they will fail way early due to residual fatigue. You simply won’t get enough fast-twitch overload on that key exercise because your pecs can’t fire effectively (a better way is coming; keep reading). A recent study verifies that...

It was reported on in the January ’04 IRON MAN by Jerry Brainum (Augustsson, J., et al. (2003). Effect of preexhaustion exercise on lower-extremity muscle activation during a leg press exercise. J Strength Cond Res. 17:411-16): The researchers used leg extensions and leg presses for their pre-ex analysis. Conclusion: “The results showed that activation of the front-thigh muscles was significantly less during pre-exhaustion compared to doing a single exercise.”

That study mirrors our findings at the ITRC: Most trainees just can’t do the big, more important exercise justice if they prefatigue with an inferior isolation exercise first. Do you really think your squats will be as effective at packing on quad mass if you do them immediately after a set of leg extensions? Absolutely not! Think about all the fatigue you create to work fewer fibers with leg extensions. That’s why you can’t use nearly as much weight on what we call the Ultimate Exercise in our Ultimate Mass Workout e-book (we identify the single best Ultimate Exercise for every bodypart)—fatigue stops you and mass stimulation is significantly reduced.

Now fatigue isn’t all bad. In fact, you should go for it toward the end of a bodypart workout. But at the beginning, you want to focus on a so-called Ultimate Exercise that hits the majority of fibers with extreme overload (heavy weight). For chest, that means some type of bench press or wide-grip dip. What about the weak-link problem? Well, your triceps may fail first or your nervous system may crap out first. It doesn’t matter. If you’ve been reading this newsletter you know the solution, one that now has bodybuilders getting bigger and stronger faster than they imagined...

When you can’t get another full rep on bench presses, you lower the bar to the pecs’ strongest position, below the midpoint, and continue to rep out with power partials. The pecs still have plenty of firepower at that max-force point, and your triceps won’t interfere—the movement is almost all pec mass. Sure, there may be some fatigue from the full-range reps, but not nearly as much as what’s created by a preliminary isolation exercise. Plus, the full-range reps are much heavier and therefore tax more fast-twitch fibers, and the X Reps extend that mass stimulation (that’s why we say X Reps make every set two to four times more effective at triggering mass!).

So X Reps not only help you leapfrog nervous system failure, which is why most trainees stop a straight set, but they also allow you to blast past the weak link—if that’s what stops you—about 10 times better than pre-exhaustion. It all boils down to forcing the target muscle’s fast-twitch fibers to keep on firing.

As we said, we’ve experimented with pre-exhaustion a number of times, and it never worked well for us at the beginning of a bodypart workout. We finally figured out why: Fatigue. On the other hand, when we introduced X Reps to the Ultimate Exercise for each bodypart right up front in our workouts, our mass and muscularity skyrocketed. You can clearly see the results in our before and after photos (and no, we weren’t using steroids).

The mass-building moral: If you want to use pre-exhaustion, save it for the backend of your bodypart attack, when you’re chasing fatigue; if you’re looking for ultimate mass, add X Reps to your big, ultimate exercise right up front—and prepare to grow!

The X-Files are not intended as training advice for everyone. You must consult your physician before beginning any diet or training program.

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