My usuall M.O. at the gym is to do the things that use the most/larger muscles first. For example, on back/bicept night the order might be:
Pulldowns/chinup
Bent over row
Reverse fly (? not sure of the correct name)
Shrugs
Seated curls
Preacher curls
Concentration curls.
The problem is that by the end of the workout I’m tired and can’t really get sets out of my last few exercises. So yesterday I decided to do everything backwards, starting with concentration curls and moving up the list. I have a “good sore” today but I’m not sure if it’s due to me simply changing it up or:
Theory
The fact that I tired out my bicepts first made them less helpful with the complex muscle excercises.
I.e. my bicepts were too tired to help on the pulldowns so my lats had to do all the work.
Does this make sense? I’ve never heard of anybody doing this, I’ve always heard “Start big, get smaller”.
That makes perfect sense. If you’re doing a compound movement like the bench press, but you wear out your delts and tris beforehand, it means that your pecs will be doing more work than normal. This will shock the muscle into further growth.
I recommend changing things around every 6-8 weeks anyway.
Well, use your new technique with caution. Common sense tells me that, although you might see new gains by tiring out a muscle group so that it can’t help with later exercises, you might also have a recipe for injury. An exhausted muscle can’t “rescue” you if you get in a bind with more weight than you can handle.
I think EVERYBODY has it nailed. Changing your workout is good. tiring smaller muscle groups makes it harder to control the large muscle group excercizes.
Further, I’ll spend one day working on extension muscle groups and two or three days later work on contracting muscle groups, just for a change of pace.
I’ll also alternate free weight workouts with cardio-bike-spinning, they really do complement each other.
