Feeder Workouts are hotly debated. On the surface, they seem like intuition fueled wishful thinking, but dig a little deeper, and they seem to take advantage of several well-known aspects of bodybuilding.
Feeder workouts donโt claim to be the end-all solution to building bigger muscles, and they were pioneered by a man with a checkered history. If youโre thinking about adding some of these supplemental workouts to your routine, letโs take a minute to break down how they work, what the aim is, and if you should even bother.
The idea of feeder workouts is to increase blood flow, supplement volume to lagging muscle groups, and focus on learning how to engage all of the muscles involved in a compound exercise.
All of that is great, in theory...
Building muscle happens in a process called hypertrophy. Basically, youโre working your muscles to the point of creating miniature breaks. Your body is compelled to repair those tears in your muscle fibers, and it builds them back up larger and more efficient than they were before. This process requires lots of protein, time, and patience.
Thatโs why your diet, routine, and rest days are so important.
If youโre never giving your body the opportunity to rebuild your tired muscles, then youโre not going to see the kind of progress you 're in the gym to achieve. Here is where we run into one of the first and easiest stumbling blocks. Donโt overwork yourself.ย
Adding feeder workouts is fine as long as youโre not overworking your body.
Feeder workouts isolate specific muscles with light weights and high rep supersets. If you feel like your triceps are holding you back during your upper body days, then youโll add a tricep feeder workout on the following day. If youโre having trouble with your calves on your lower body day, then youโll tack on some calf feeders the next day.ย
These arenโt going to be anything super heavy, weโre talkingย calisthenics๏ปฟย or five to fifteen-pound weights. And youโre not going to be doing several sets of these. You may be doing something like two sets of twenty-five for something like your triceps, or three sets of twenty for a larger muscle group like your quads.
Youโre also supposed to take time in the mirror to flex the body part you performed your feeder workouts on, taking the time to visualize the way they move and interact with your other muscle groups, and then take yourself straight to bed. Supposedly this mirror time is strengthening your mind-muscle connection and encouraging your brain to send additional nutrients to those lagging muscles.
Feeder workouts go against conventional weightlifting wisdom in a lot of ways.
Instead of giving a muscle group a couple of unbothered rest days, youโre essentially keeping them awake all week long. The idea is to keep your problem areas at the forefront of your mind.ย
Say youโre doing a 4-day split routine, and you feel like yourย grip strength and calves are struggling to keep up with your routine. Maybe theyโre just not seeing the kind of muscle growth you were looking for.
Adding in feeder workouts to this routine would look something like this:
Day 1: Upper body push
Day 2: Upper body pull + forearm feeder exercises
Day 3: quads, hamstrings, and calves
Day 4: shoulders, traps, and forearms + calf feeder exercises
Rich Piana pioneered feeder workouts as we know them today.ย
Rich Piana was a fiend. He loved bodybuilding with everything he had. He won his first National Physique Committee title as a teen, before taking two more later on as an adult. He became Mr. California in 1989. He even had a couple of television appearances when they needed somebody that looked particularly ripped.
He worked hard for his results, and his track record reflected that.
However, time in the gym and his famous feeder workouts werenโt the only things pumping his muscles up. Twice over the course of his prolific YouTube career, he admitted to using anabolic steroids starting as young as 18. He never suggested that his audience use them, and routinely cited their negative side effects, which he seemed to suffer from towards the end of his life.
Steroid use aside, he was, far and away, exceptional in the realm of bodybuilding. His tenacity and drive were the things that pushed him over the top, and itโs clear that something about his routine was different from what other people did, and his results were unquestionably something great.ย
Piana died in 2017 after a heart attack. His brain was starved of oxygen for almost half an hour, and he spent two weeks in a medically induced coma, in hopes that the swelling in his brain would go down. He eventually passed away, and an autopsy showed that his heart and liver were engorged to well over twice their usual size, something his girlfriend said he was aware of. He never had a toxicology analysis, so thereโs no saying whether the steroid use was the cause of his death, but regardless of their hand in his passing, that will forever cast a long shadow over his achievements.
Letโs start by talking about what that even is. The mind-muscle connection sounds like something youโd hear about during a yoga session, and youโre not wrong there. Itโs really just another word for the kind of mindfulness you find while youโre trying to strike a particularly difficult pose.
This is something that feeder workouts excel in.
Youโre supposed to be doing higher reps of these low-intensity exercises and then taking a luxurious moment in the mirror flexing a muscle group that youโve spent several uninterrupted minutes making the same exact motion with.
Youโre learning exactly how to work your muscles, how you can most effectively move that muscle, what part of your body that muscle moves, how it feels when youโre moving that muscle, and what it feels like when that muscle is experiencing a period of increased blood flow. Youโre directing so much attention to one particular part of your body that it will soon become impossible to forget what it feels like to focus on that muscle.
Your body and mind are incredible.
When you as a lifter put your mind to a task and execute it as effectively as possible, youโll find yourself overcoming obstacles that seemed insurmountable before. This is a well-documented effect, and feeder workouts are designed to takeย advantage of that.
You can think of them as meditation sessions or masterclasses in the mechanical inner workings of your body.ย
This is the second most hotly debated aspect of feeder workouts. The flexing and strict adherence to an immediate bedtime sound a little bit fanciful, and honestly, you can cut that part out if it feels silly. The most important things here are effective isolation and appreciation for the minute aspects of your body.ย
After applying feeder workouts to your routine, you should be able to come back to your regular workout with newfound knowledge of how exactly your lagging muscle groups were holding you back, and how to engage them effectively to get a better lift out of your workout.ย
Feeder workouts are all about building muscle, and that means youโre going to have to feed yourself as well. Weโve already discussed the process of building muscle, but if you neglect to fill your tank with materials to build muscle mass with, then youโre not going to get very far in this process.ย
This is another problem people may run into while adding feeder workouts to their routine. Youโre trying to build muscle mass in tricky areas with the intention of getting better lifts out of your regular routine. If you take this time out of your day to pack in a hundred extra hammer curls, but you donโtย load up on protein, then youโre just wasting your time.ย
Your results come from your diet just as much as they come from the gym.
You need to come into your workout with carbohydrates to burn as well. Coming in without the energy to pull off your routine isnโt an exercise in willpower, itโs an exercise in futility. Your body is just like anything else in the world, and it needs energy to run. Youโre just going to be hobbling your ability to lift if you donโt come to the gym prepared.
Sometimes itโs hard to think about what you want to eat next. Your brain is just like your body, and if youโveย run out of energy๏ปฟย by burning it all up in the gym, then youโre going to have a harder time with your impulse control and critical thinking.
The two things you need most to make informed diet decisions. Take some time to either map out a menu for the week or prep your meals ahead of time so you can keep yourself on track. It would be a shame to have added something as helpful as feeder exercises just to throw it all away because you skipped over something as easy as eating the right amount of protein.
Adding feeder workouts to your routine doesnโt mean youโre never resting. Rest days are just as important as staying active. Without each other, youโre going to run into a plateau very quickly.
Rest days donโt have to be days where youโre sitting around for 24 hours. If you really want to keep yourself active throughout the week you can do some light cardio. Cardio is great for rest days, because that increased blood flow and focus on breathing effectively will only help your ability to lift more during your regular workout. You need oxygen to power your muscles, and if you can get more of it then you can only be helping yourself in the end.ย
Cardio isnโt the only thing you can do to help yourself out on aย rest day.
Stretching while youโre in the process of building muscle is great for your body in the long run. Keeping your body limber while you add more and more rigid muscle is something you can benefit from in every aspect of life. If you canโt find time to work in stretches during your warm-up, then stretching on your rest days is the next best thing. This, like cardio, will help you out with your general blood flow, and we already know what that means for building muscle andย improving performance.ย
Common feeder exercises are exercises youโre probably already familiar with. Theyโre isolation exercises that target your problem areas, so get out your lighter dumbbells and try your hand at these:
Shoulders
Shoulders are some of the trickiest muscles toย bulk up.
If you want to get a good looking all around physique like your favorite bodybuilders, then youโre going to want to shuffle in some shoulder feeder exercises, for sure. Try targeting your delts with lateral raises, shoulder shrugs, and wide grip bench presses.ย
Remember to keep the weights light if youโre going to be taking on the wide grip bench presses. You want to get in a serious number of reps, and feeder workouts arenโt about blasting through a new personal record. Donโt let your pride get in the way of results.
Triceps
Triceps are simple to isolate. If youโre looking to get bigger arms, and you find that theyโve become a choke point in your progress then you can get target these with some simple exercises like skullcrushers or diamond pushups.
Pull-ups are also a good exercise for tricep isolation, but itโs going to be hard to get in some high rep exercise in, especially if youโre not great at pull-ups.
Chestย
Getting a bigger chest is something most gym-goers are probably aiming for. The big solid barrel chest is the mark of a fit man, and if you want to use feeder exercises to supplement that then go right ahead.ย
The easiest way to do this is by dropping your bench press weight way down and getting in a lot of reps the day after you do your normal chest workout. Remember not to overload yourself if youโre going to implement feeder exercises. Itโs tempting to use this as an additional opportunity to get your heaviest lifts in, but thatโs going to become a fast lane to failure.ย
There will never ever be a magic bullet. You canโt just build more muscle by willing it into existence, but feeder workouts can be an effective way to increase the volume of work a specific muscle group does in order to grow that muscle.ย
This means that feeder workouts can be perfect for anybody, or the thing that ruins an otherwise perfect routine if you overwork those muscles. Theyโre only going to help if youโre selecting the right problem areas and isolating them effectively.
Feeder workouts will help you boost your overall strength, and the results you get from these supplemental exercises lie in their cumulative effect.
They teach you about the mechanics of your body in a way that other workouts donโt tend to allow for, and youโll learn how to lift more effectively if you take the kind of deep dive into your anatomy that feeder workouts are secretly asking you to. So, feel free to take on this challenge if youโre going to face it honestly.
