Motivate Lagging Muscles

[Ugh Togoth]

http://www.t-nation.com/readTopic.do?id=1644395

Strategy 1: If you have problems recruiting a muscle because it's getting overpowered by others when you perform an exercise, you should use either the pre-fatigue or post-fatigue method. This means supersetting an isolation exercise for the muscle you have problems recruiting with your main training movement.

The isolation exercise is either placed before (pre-fatigue) or after (post-fatigue). Normally I prefer to use the post-fatigue technique, but an activation problem is one of the cases where I actually prefer to use the pre-fatigue method. In that situation, the isolation exercise serves two purposes:

1. It can improve your capacity to activate the target muscle during the main movement via enhanced feedback. By enhanced feedback I mean that the isolation movement will create a localized fatigue and pump that will result in your feeling that muscle group more during the performance of the main movement. Since you can feel that muscle working during your set, it's easier to develop a good mind-muscle link.

2. By creating a certain amount of fatigue with the isolation movement, you make sure that this muscle will be fully stimulated even though it normally doesn't receive maximum stimulation during the multi-joint exercise.

Post-fatigue (performing the isolation exercise after the main movement) does allow you to fully stimulate the target muscle if it hasn't been thoroughly worked with the main, multi-joint exercise. However, you don't get the enhanced feedback effect. That's why when you have problems recruiting a certain muscle, pre-fatigue is a better option: it'll allow you to develop the capacity to recruit that hard-to-target muscle group.

Pre-fatigue isn't as effective as post-fatigue at stimulating maximal growth because you can't use as much weight on the multi-joint movement (because you pre-fatigued a muscle group involved in the lift). That's why you should see pre-fatigue as a "learning tool."

It allows you to become better at recruiting the muscle you want to build. Before being able to fully stimulate growth in a muscle, you must first be able to recruit it optimally! That's the reason why pre-fatigue, which on paper is an inferior muscle-building method, can become very effective for a specific purpose.