Pre-exhaustion and VRT

[JoeJustice]

Greg,

Have you ever considered the technique of pre-exhaustion with VRT? I think I've really stumbled onto a good thing with this in my current workout; pairing a power cal with a self resistance movement. Consider pairing Push-Ups with VRT chest flies. By doing the power call movement you're exhausting the chest muscles, then by immediately switching to the VRT movement, your chest is nowhere near as strong as your back, so the resistance is much greater than if you were fully rested. After doing three sets of this combo you're toast! :)

I've bee working on these combo movements and it seems like when you really get a good pairing you can thoroughly thrash a particular muscle group. Seem this can be particularly helpful for areas where the antagonist muscle group is stronger.

-Joe

[VRT Man]

Joe, a lot of this occured to me as I combined various power cals with VRT four years ago. When doubling up a push-up variation such as an HPU or Atlas II or III with a VRT chest fly or VRT bench I noticed a definite pre-exhaustion! I combined the two in 2005 for a period of about 3 months. Combining the two may be detrimental to some; unless VRT can be done on a low-intensity basis. I now forego doing the two together to avoid too much of an overload.

Greg Mangan

[JoeJustice]

I'm really enjoying this approach. I think the "trick" is to not go to failure with the power cals. If you go to failure on your push-ups, follow that with chest flies and then do push-ups again right away, I think you could get burnt out. That said something like that might be good every once in awhile, maybe once or twice a week to break a plateau.

-Joe