FT Questions....

[Scott Stevenson]

Hey Scott and FT vets. I just have a question about neural demand of muscle rounds.

Today I did a smith split squat muscle round for the first time, inspired by the most recent muscle minds podcast lol. Absolutely brutal. Felt like my quads were going to rip of the bone, lungs were screaming. Needless to say I was pretty destroyed after. Went to do my pump set of leg extensions for quads and only mustered 11 reps at a Wright I did last time for 15. Quads just felt dead. This is my first week back after a week off during my cruise and have felt pretty good all week, so this concerned me a bit.

I guess my question is, is it normal too see a big drop in performance on a pump set after a really hard MR like that? Normally I do a leg press variation for my MR and ive never had this happen. I've had issues with CNS recovery in the past so I'm just concerned about the performance drop being due to overtaxing the CNS vs my quads themselves just being killed by the MR and the rest of the training week. Quads have been a bit sore all week since loading day on Tuesday, but felt decent going into the session today.

Thanks for your help!

This sounds pretty normal to me, given how much harder the smith split squat MR was for you.

(This is why the context of the workout matters when it comes to MR's where you can mix them up in terms of order, etc. What would matter if / when you come back and repeat this sequence of exercises that you find that you increase the reps / weight for one or both exercises.

OTOH, you could do a MR for leg press next week and then follow that with knee extensions. In this case, if you're progressing, you'd expect an improvement in one or both of these exercises (when performed in this context).



-S