Another pump set thread

[Scott Stevenson]

Thank you for your quick reply Scott! basically, he developped his own style.

As for the pumpsets: Should we really do it on the fly and as we feel that day? I can imagine it is harder to track progress that way? Or should we rotate through exercises? And by rotate I mean some kind of system in them?

Thanks in advance man!

Actually, as far as Jordan and pump sets, he was doing just what I set out - auto regulate them as you see fit and ONE option is to just do a straight set. That's what he preferred.

You *can* do whatever you want with the Pump sets, but your might want you take another gander at the FT e-book - Pump sets are in particular, very specifically and intentionally included as an autoregulatory part of the program that you are very much supposed to perform (within the rough rep range I've set out) as you feel fits your state of local muscular and general / systemic recovery.

If you read in the book - you don't ave to log those at all, but you can just to note what you did for your own edification (i.e., so you can look back on your records and get clues as to what is working, not working, creating a lot of soreness, etc.)

If part of how your personality manifests auto regulation is in a desire / need to have some kind of system / order to how you do the Pump sets then so be it. That's not really how I intended them to be applied, but if you simply have to do so, then that's how it is.

The point here is to use Pump sets (like the stretches) to fine tune the magnitude and location (via exercise selection) of the stress that you impose given your state of recovery. If you feel you just have to do 5's into the hole for every single Pump set because "more is always better" then that probably won't be the best choice on a day when can sense deep and even sharp muscle soreness just in doing a light warm-up stretch of the muscle.

To some degree this is just common sense - if the muscle isn't recovered and / or you are feeling that recovery is not optimal, then it doesn't make sense to dig that hole even deeper, given that there more more workouts for every muscle group coming up soon. Options here are to change volume Tier or move to an Intensive Cruise, of course, but if you're making progress and can just sense that on a given day, after pounding the living shit out of a muscle group during the previous muscle rounds (Day 3 / 4) and loading sets and the loading sets of that day were systemically taxing, to annihilate those muscle groups that day with Pump sets.

You might instead find that, lets say for back, that your upper back has taken a thrashing, but lower lats could use some more stimulation so you use some pullover variation or a cable "stretcher" with a hold in the contracted position to really nail the lower lat "tie in" area.

OTOH, there might be a day when you're feeling like gravity is your biyatch and there's still lots of ass-whoppin' to be done and want to go to down with the pump sets. This might also be a day when you're training muscle groups that you feel / have found need the extra work, so you want to really tag them during that workout.

If you're just doing some standard Pump Set technique, set in stone without any flexibility, you can end up either creating larger inroads into recovery than you want to that day, or shortchanging yourself if you've got more gas in the tank.

-Scott