Couple of questions !

[Scott Stevenson]

Week 6 of Blast number 3 on Tier 2, which is the highest I have gone and meets my requirements so far.

I know FT is not set in stone and can be adapted to meet our own needs but I wonder on a couple of things.

I know generally its suggested to have a cruise period after 5 or max 6 weeks, but if I am recovering well and still feeling pretty good can I continue or should I force myself to take the cruise?

Prior to FT I was running Nortons PHAT for a long time and so I feel this set me up to be used to the physical exertion of FT so I think intensity is something I prefer.

Nope, that's not set in stone as far as the 6 weeks. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. As much as anything, 6 weeks was derived empirically as the time when a vast majority of folks would end up blasting, if really pushing hard to make progress during a Blast.

But you can indeed grind it out for a longer period. You simply want to make sure your'e still gaining at a good rate, as (after) the IC is often when gains manifest.

My second question is with regards to loading exercise selections. I know we pick from a pool of 3 exercises rotating every week so the same exercise gets hit twice in say a 6 week blast. What is the theory with this? Wouldn't it be better to have a set exercise such as say Squats for thigh load and stick with it for 6 weeks to give a chance to really progress with it?

This is one that was asked a good bit wrt DC training.

There are a few reasons.

Both Dante and I (both in the 90's literally) figured that a 3 group rotation worked really well. I played round with just a couple groupings or banging away with the "same workout" when I was ending my time with DC and developing FT and still came back to this.

The Loading Set exercises are your go to exercises. IF you're gaining, the 3 week period in between will allow gains in size to manifest as gains in strength. Weekly training with the same exercise can often mean some acute neurological strength gains, but they can taper off quickly if these are exercises you've done for years (as they typically would be) and are "neurologically stable" in the regard. So, b/c the reps are low, you can end up very easily - to beat the log book - altering form just a little bit to get an extra rep if youre training the same exercise each week. (This is not so much the case for MR's and Pump sets which are higher in reps.) Basically: My experience told me that FT needed (absolutely) to have a pure progressive overload component, so this is it, set up such that the gains in strength are d/t to gains in muscle mass as much as possible (the goal here).

Using the same exercises for heavy training week in and week out for heavy training can tend to lead to tendinitis, etc.

Variety is a good thing to have: This schema is a nice way to balance variety for the sake of novelty of stimulus (3 weeks between training a muscle group) and ensuring progressive overload. (Two main training principles.)

You can come back and bang away at exercises with the other set types (MR and pump sets), doing the same exercise each week if you like (and it's not causing issues). This is a great strategy for week muscle groups and exercises you do this with where your focus is really targeting the muscle that you have a poor "mind-muscle connection" with, e..g, one that would tend to not be a biomechanical weak link or neurologically would tend to not be activated more as a set progressed toward failure.

So, the bang away at one exercise week in and week out to target a weak muscle groups lends itself better to MR's and Pump sets.

So, the basic idea here is that when focused on progressive overload, we want strength gains to come from muscle mass gains to the extent possible or at least limit the neurological / psychological component (any acute learning or motivational effect).

-S