 Hey everybody I'm Lance Goyki. Today I want to discuss the difference between your primary exercise and your secondary or your assistance exercises. So in general, well not in general, every program has an order in which we do things and if you watched our video yesterday we talked a little bit about that. We want to make sure that we put those big bang for your buck like going to get you a lot of your adaptation, a lot of your improvement. We want to put those things earlier in the program. Well generally the more technically demanding exercises are the ones with the bigger payoff. And so you know our example was a squatting program for a power lifter. I don't want to start with simple like hamstring curl exercises. I want to put in my squat first while I'm fresh because if you've ever watched somebody do a long set of squats as they get fatigued the technique gets worse and worse and worse and so they're getting less and less out of that. They're learning worse patterns right and they just can't push themselves. Force output drops everything right. Now again that is less of an issue in a hypertrophy program but if it's just strength and power or technique based program then you want to prioritize that. The other major thing that I want to you know a distinction that I want to make is like your primary exercise is basically the thing you're trying to get better. The assistance exercise is not there to stroke your ego it's just there to make you better. So what people commonly do and commonly mess up is they chase these assistance exercises. They want those to become like competitions and they keep trying to increase weight on exercises that really aren't designed for that. They're designed to kind of undo some of the bad things about what you've done. So a good example is if I'm squatting and deadlifting a lot and that's my goal I want to get those better well I might do ab exercises because it will directly oppose the squatting and the deadlifting stiffness in my back that develops while I do squatting and deadlifting. But it's not necessarily going to make my squatting deadlift go up it's just going to keep my body together so that I can keep training and not have any setbacks. That's like I think in my mind that's the simplest example but you could also talk about just like a basic hamstring curl you're targeting the hamstring it's not about using the most weight if I click my hip flexors on and I bear down and I do my hamstring curl then yeah I'm going to be able to use more weight but I'm going to shift some of that force off of the hamstring so make sure you're using the right stuff make sure your technique is appropriate don't shorten your range of motion like doing a lateral raise or something don't shorten your range of motion and just squeeze random reps out if that's not the goal of the exercise the goal there is to fatigue that particular muscle for those isolation type exercises hopefully that helps shed some light on the difference between your primary exercise of the day and your assistance exercises.