Contantly pounding your body with heavy weights and low reps can take it's toll on you, both physically and mentally. Squats may be the most beneficial weight lifitng exercise you can do. However, putting hundreds of pounds on your back workout after workout, always trying to better your performance, can kill your motivation.

The same goes for any of the best exercises - deadlifts, bench press, shoulder press, stiff-legged deadlift, etc. So what do you do to increase your muscle mass when you find yourself grinding down on the most important exercises?

A technique that I use to break out of a rut, and one that will kickstart your motivation and new muscle mass growth, is plain old vanilla pre-exhaustion. Sure, it's been around a long time but how many people do you see use it consistently? And why should they? Because it flat out works!

For those of you that may not be familiar with the technique, pre-exhaustion works like this. It's nothing more than a superset, which is performing two different exercises back to back with no rest in between. However, the selection and order of the two exercises is specific to pre-exhaustion. While you could superset bent over barbell rows and bench presses, that's not a pre-exhaust set.

Pre-exhaustion involves using a single-joint (or isolation) exercise, followed immediately by a multi-joint (or compound) exercise that works the same muscle group.

So what's the point of pre-exhaustion and how can you use it effectively to break out of a rut and build more muscle mass?

The pre-exhaustion technique is beneficial in a few ways. First of all, it increases your level of intensity. How does it do this? By allowing you to perform more work in less time. And we know that increasing your intensity level over time leads to more muscle gain.

The pre-exhaustion technique also allows you to pre-fatigue a muscle group, thus possibly bypassing a weak link in a specific exercise, which again allows you to increase the intensity of an exercise.

For example, for many people their weak link on the bench press is their tricpes. Unless you're naturally barrel chested, a good portion of the rep on the bench press is performed by the tricep. By utilizing an isolation movement first, like the pec deck or cable crossover, you fatigue the pec muscles. This allows the fresh triceps to help fatigue the pecs even more on the next exercise, the bench press.

This technique can also help you mentally by giving you a break from the huge poundaged on the compound movements. How does it do that? Obviously, you have to lighten the load on the compound movements when you do them right after a set of the isolation exercise.

Another variation of the technique is to continue to perform straight sets but do so in a certain order. For example, you may perform three straight sets of 10 reps on the pec deck and then move on to your three sets of the bench press. You may even want to use both in different periods of time. Or experiment with both pre-exhuast technique to see which one you prefer.

Either way, you'll get a fresh workout that can help you break through ruts and start building muscle mass again.