What is the Best Exercise Order: Maximizing the Mind-Muscle Connection

The order of exercises in your workouts is crucial for stimulating muscles to the fullest. You must establish a mind-muscle connection from the onset of your workout and maintain it throughout. Each repetition must be performed with your mind focused on the contraction of the primary muscle being used.

So, when doing a compound movement such as the bench press, your mind must be focused on the contraction of your chest, or more specifically, the sternal head of the pectoralis major. By sensing the muscle working, you will keep most of the emphasis on it. Otherwise, the assisting muscles, such as the anterior deltoids, and the triceps brachii, will become too involved in the movement, therefore reducing stimulation of the pectoralis major.

Compound Exercises First

To achieve a sufficient mind-muscle connection, you must perform exercises in a certain order. When pairing muscle groups, you should train the larger muscles first, followed by the smaller muscles. Before training each major muscle, you must first perform two warm-up sets of the first exercise for that muscle. The exercise must be a compound movement for larger muscles, and an isolation movement for smaller muscles. The purpose of the warm-up is to increase blood flow to the primary muscle and to establish a certain level of focus.

The first warm-up set should be done with lighter weights to allow for 20 repetitions. For the second warm-up set, slightly heavier weights should be used to decrease the reps to 15. Again, your mind must be focused on feeling the target muscle being worked.

Following the two warm-up sets, you can begin performing the working sets of the first compound exercise. By this point, blood should be accumulating in the target muscle. As long as you maintain a mind-muscle connection during each set, themuscle “pump” should increase in the primary muscle that you are targeting.

The reason for starting your workouts with compound exercises, when training larger muscles, is because you will be able to use heavier weights, as a result of more muscles being involved. Lifting heavier weights will result in more muscle fibers being recruited. However, your goal shouldn’t just be lifting the heaviest weight possible. You must use proper form and focus the workload on the primary muscle being used. This is why you must establish a mind-muscle connection from the get-go, or else the assisting muscles will take away the workload from the prime mover.

Transition to Isolation Exercises

As you progress through your workout for the larger muscle, you should shift away from compound exercises, and on to isolation exercises. If you’re pairing the larger muscle with a smaller muscle, then you would perform isolation movements for the smaller muscle once you’ve completed all the movements for the larger muscle. So, for example, say you were training your pectoralis major (larger muscle group) and triceps brachii (smaller muscle group). Once you’ve performed all the pectoralis major compound and isolation exercises, you would then start to perform isolation exercises for your triceps. The reason why you should only do isolation movements at this point is because you want to keep the focus on the smaller muscle. Most compound exercises would shift the workload away 
from the smaller muscle and towards the large muscle.