Should you "Pre-Exhaust" your chest?

Should you “Pre-Exhaust” your chest?

Pre-exhaustion is a commonly used technique in chest training. With pre-exhaustion, you fatigue the chest with cable flyes before bench pressing so that you can improve chest activation. But does this actually work?

A few studies put pre-exhaustion to the test and found that not your chest, but the triceps are activated more during the bench press if you perform cable flyes before [1-3]. This is because when you fatigue your chest before the bench press, secondary muscle groups like the triceps will have to take over the movement.

So instead of “exhausting” your chest before the bench with flyes, simply do some light bench warm-up or even light cable chest flyes sets to prepare you for your first set. The goal is to warm up the chest before benching, not to completely fatigue it