Isolate Your Muscles

Get better results from more than 20 exercises with this workout wake-up call.

Have you been squatting up a storm without seeing your posterior plump up with muscle, or do your chin-ups triple your trap size without building your back? Then it’s time to give those lazy muscles a wake-up call with some pre-activation exercises.

Pre-activation — aka corrective exercise, active warm-up or post-activation potentiation (PAP) — is a technique that involves “turning on” a target muscle with an isolation or conditioning exercise before the main lift or activity you’re doing. A lot of muscles are lazy or shut down (the gluteals, lats, abdominals and deeper core muscles are notorious slackers), usually because of improper mechanics or lifestyle trends, such as sitting a lot during the day. The inactivity of these muscles means that other muscles — like your quads, lower back and traps — take over as a result, reducing the effectiveness of the exercise, creating a poor movement pattern and putting you at risk for injury. And you clearly don’t get the results you want, which can lead to disappointment with your training.

Pre-activating the muscles you’re trying to work with a specific movement will kick-start your neural drive — specific parts of your nervous system — and get you on the road to the results you’re after.

Mind Over Muscle

But it’s not enough just to do the movement — you’ve also got to get your gray matter involved. It’s not a matter of mind over muscle but rather mind into muscle. Research has shown that focusing on a muscle and/or visualizing it contract can improve activation and hypertrophy results, meaning your muscle will grow. So if you concentrate hard on your glutes when doing a one-legged bridge, for example, you are better able to replicate the sensation of the intense gluteal contraction and make a deadlift more effective. This neuromuscular training — getting your body to do exactly what your brain tells it to — will eventually become an unconscious pattern that your muscles automatically follow, but for now, it takes practice.

The key with pre-activation is to wake up and engage the proper muscles without pre-fatiguing them, thereby making them less active. In order to prime the neuromuscular system to turn on those fibers without pooping them out, pre-activation exercises have to be done either at a light to moderate intensity or at a high intensity for just a few reps.

With all this in mind — it seems more complicated than it really is — integrate the corresponding pre-activation moves into your warm-up before the indicated main exercises and target muscles. Do one to three sets of 10 to 12 reps using light to moderate resistance if you’re a newer workout warrior or three to five reps using heavier resistance if you’re more advanced. Remember: Don’t rush and instead focus on the entire contraction — positive and negative, up and down — with your brain and your body working in unison!