Question: What should I do if I have stalled on one or two exercises while I continue to make progress on all of the others? I’m working out twice each week alternating between two different workouts with different exercises so each exercise is only performed once a week.
Answer: Assuming your form and intensity of effort are not the problem it depends on which exercises you are performing, how much of an overlap there is in muscular involvement, and the order of performance. Every exercise you perform causes both systemic and local muscular fatigue which affect your ability to perform subsequent exercises. Because of this, you will tend to increase reps or weight faster on exercises performed earlier in the workout and slower on exercises later in the workout, especially when performing two or more exercises targeting the same muscle groups.
For example, if your workout includes squat, chin-up, bench press, stiff-legged deadlift, standing press, bent-over row in that order, you will probably increase reps and weight faster in the first three than the last three because of both the large systemic effect of compound exercises and the overlap between squats and deadlifts, chin-ups and rows, and bench and standing presses. You may be getting stronger on the last three exercises, but this is not reflected in the repetition and weight increases because despite being stronger you are also more fatigued by the time you perform them from the increases in weight and/or reps on previous exercises.
Suppose one week during one of your workouts you perform a set of chin-ups followed immediately by barbell curls and you are able to perform eight strict repetitions of each. If you increase your chin-up repetitions to ten it will be obvious you have gotten stronger on chin-ups, but if you only perform eight repetitions on curls again it might appear you have not gotten stronger. However, consider that it is harder to perform eight repetitions of curls after performing ten chin-ups than after performing eight due to the greater local muscular fatigue in your biceps, and just matching your previous repetitions would indicate an improvement. The same occurs to a lesser extent in subsequent exercises targeting different muscle groups due to systemic fatigue.
My first suggestion if your workout includes multiple exercises targeting the same muscle groups is to check if you are performing any of them back to back. Unless you are doing so for the sake of pre-exhaustion (which doesn’t appear to provide any advantage) you should re-order them. Notice in the sequence mentioned above pushing exercises are alternated with pulling exercises; there is little overlap between subsequent exercises and the grip is only challenged by every other exercise:
- Squat: hips and thighs
- Chin-up: upper back, rear shoulders, biceps
- Bench Press: chest, front shoulders, triceps
- Stiff-legged Deadlift: hips, thighs, lower back
- Standing Press: shoulders, triceps
- Bent-over Row: upper back, rear shoulders, biceps
If this does not improve workout to workout performance on the lagging exercises, you should use a dynamic exercise order. I have covered this in detail in both Dynamic Exercise Order for Greater Strength and Size Gains and Q&A: Exercise Order and Performance.
If all exercises for the same muscle group are lagging or if your workouts do not include exercises targeting overlapping muscle groups and an exercise is lagging the targeted muscle group may require more recovery between workouts. An easy way to test this without altering the rest of your routine significantly is to not perform exercises for that muscle group in every other workout. If the problem is too little recovery for those muscle groups you will make better progress with the extra rest. From there you can determine how much more recovery they require and modify your workouts accordingly, possibly switching from a full-body routine to a body-part split routine. You may find you have some muscle groups which respond well to being trained twice weekly while others respond better to only being trained once weekly or even less frequently.
Another option would be to skip one or two workouts to allow for extra recovery then only perform the exercises you are lagging on for a few weeks. Without all of the other exercises making demands on recovery the muscle groups targeted may respond better. If they do, frequency is not the problem, but the volume of exercise performed during your workouts. If they do not it is an indication they require longer recovery between workouts.
Some trainers recommend switching exercises when this happens, however this is a mistake. This recommendation is based on a misunderstanding of what exercise adaptation is and how it occurs, something I have explained in The Ultimate Routine.
For more information on exercise order and examples of both full-body and split high intensity training routines read High Intensity Workouts.
Comments on this entry are closed.
Great article. After reading this article, I plan to modify so I ensure I am doing one exercise per body part. I thought Pre-Exhaustion was encouraged. Thank you Drew.
Hey Dominick,
Pre-exhaustion has been part of a lot of high intensity training programs for a long time, but it doesn’t work any better than performing the exercises in a different order, with or without rest or other exercises in between. It doesn’t work any worse either, though.
Thanks for this article, Drew! Great insight into workout order/performance. Will try this out over the next few weeks
Hey Ryan,
You’re welcome. Please let me know how it goes!
Thanks for the great write up. If one would do deadlifts first how what that change the order? I ask because the order is slightly different in the book.
I tired it today and my press felt good even though it was later in the routine. Almost as if it was “warmed up”
Hey Eric,
If you wanted to do these exercises starting with the stiff-legged deadlift the order I would use is stiff-leg deadlift, bench press, chin-up, squat, standing press, row. Although this is pull, push, pull, push, push, pull instead of alternating push and pull, this keeps the rest between lower body, upper body pulling, and upper body pushing exercises the same, and the shoulder press wouldn’t be affected as much as the bent over rows by the squats.
I find that if i do my “big” exercises (squats or deadlifts) first, it wipes me out so much that the rest of my workout suffers accordingly. I throw them in last on most workouts now.
Drew, what are your thoughts on spending a few workouts to focus on sticking points? I know some machines with a good resistance curve don’t really have a sticking point, but us barbell users know it well.
I think Drew has mentioned in other posts that sometimes changing to a higher or lower resistance can work, since some people simply do better at higher/lower TULS. For example, I made the best progress of my life deadlifting once every two weeks trying to keep it in the 15 rep ballpark. Any attempts to up the weight in order to do fewer reps always netted me regression.
Also, it seems like exercises that have a strong sticking point like overhead press do better at higher reps. It appears to me that the lower resistance/higher rep scheme helps one to achieve true muscle failure rather than getting stuck at a point of unfavorable joint position with plenty of juice left in the muscles.
Kevin,
This order is fine, but if you’re having difficulty with other exercises after them you may need to work more on your conditioning.
I wouldn’t dedicate workouts specifically to training the sticking points in any exercise. I cover why in more detail in Elements of Form.
Drew,
I believe Dr. Doug McGuff encouraged rotating the first exercise you perform each workout. For example, if your upper body routine included:
1. chest press
2. shoulder press
3. pull down
4. row
The next workout structured with the last exercise first:
1. row
2. chest press
3. shoulder press
4. pull down.
I’m not sure if I understood this correctly, but is this more beneficial than completing the exercises in the same order each workout?
Hey Jay,
As long as there’s little overlap in the muscles targeted in subsequent exercises this can be effective, however it makes record keeping more difficult. If you do this record the exercise sequence in the upper right corner of the weight/reps box on your chart so that when you are evaluating progress later on you are able to see what effect the variation in exercise order has and take it into consideration when evaluating progress.
Mike (Mentzer) and I spoke at length about pre-exhaustion mid-90’s. Despite being a former advocate in his prime, Mike was of the opinion they weren”t the be all, end all. His actual words were “don’t get too hung up on any one method”.
I tend to agree…I have always had a love/hate relationship with pre-ex. Diminishing the output on second exercise–the true mass-builder–always troubled me. I can see where the premise lays, and how it came about, just not keen on watering down my efforts on the basic mass-builder.