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Story originally printed in the La Crosse Tribune or online at www.lacrossetribune.com

Published - Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Muscle Minutes: Save smaller exercises for ‘dessert’

By Travis Erickson | University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

“Don’t eat your dessert before your meal!” A variation of this is, “Don’t eat that, you’ll spoil your dinner!” Why do we try to live by these simple rules?

The premise is that the nutritive quality of a meal is higher than sweets or junk food, and it’s important that we get this high-quality fuel into our bodies.

In the realm of strength training, there is junk food, too. While cookies and potato chips may have their place, we don’t want to feast on them. Likewise, we don’t want to feast on simple exercises like biceps curls, calf raises and sit-ups.

It’s important to build your strength training workout around substantive things that include movements at multiple joints and involve large muscle groups — exercises like leg presses, chest presses and upper-body rowing or pulling motions.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t ever do curls, calf raises and sit-ups, but you should save these for dessert. Do them toward the end of your workout. The behavior of snacking before a meal diminishes your intake of quality nutrients; exhausting small muscle groups before larger ones has a similar effect.

If you do two or three sets of biceps curls before doing a set of pull-ups, it makes things much more challenging. The amount of weight or number of repetitions you could perform is compromised because your biceps are fatigued.

So what? The end result is the large muscles of the upper back do not get a very good workout; your biceps will get stronger, but your back will not. All multi-joint exercises utilize more than one set of muscle groups. If you fatigue one, you fatigue them all, just like the weakest link in a chain.

An even stronger example involves your abdominals and lower back. People who always do crunches, sit-ups, etc. before doing their workout perform a disservice to their bodies by putting themselves at heightened risk for injury.

Fatiguing the muscles of the abdominals and lower back before doing exercises such as a back squat or bench press makes it more likely these postural muscles will fail and cause injury.

Remember the last time you hurt your back? It really made you realize how much you use it, didn’t it? Large, multi-joint exercises involve a large number of muscles, so be sure to do these exercises at the beginning of your workout and save the smaller, single-joint exercises for the end.

Travis Erickson is director of undergraduate strength and conditioning concentration at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. E-mail questions to erickson.trav@uwlax.edu.