FT Questions....

[Scott Stevenson]

Scott,

Recently going through some of Jordan Peter's Logs, I found that he used your system way back in 2016 for NABBA. That is pretty sick!

Jordan says most individuals could benefit from a fullbody or upper/lower program to really get a base and gain strength in the gym and I agree. Even though I have been bodybuilding for 3 years, I never went through those phases. I ran your program for a blast and man it was fun! I definitely thought I could handle tier 3, but ended up having to deload from the fatigue sooner than I thought.

Jordan laid out a fullbody program where you just train EOD rotating heavy upper / light lower and heavy lower / light upper. This is pretty close to your program minus the muscle round days so my question is are the muscle round days to help with not having to continuously load every day you enter the gym and help with systematic fatigue? Or is it just a day to give a different type of stimulus to the muscle? Thanks in advance!

Sure, man!

The MR's are there for a few reasons:

Variety of loading scheme - increasing "effective" reps, so to speak, without the expense on the nervous system that comes with having more failure points as you would with straight sets.


Exercise variety: You can use exercises that you might not want to use for your big loading sets but aren't the best for high rep sets.

The reps after a failure point (if failing in the 4th or 5th set of the MR) offer the chance to further improve the mind muscle connection and, with the lesser load, mean you can be sure the focus is on the target muscle vs. the tendency that many have to start using accessory muscles to move the load / complete reps.

People find the MR's FUN!

You can be sure that if you execute it correctly, that you're going to get a great stimulus with a MR, but the seem to be less psychologically taxing in that you can enter into the MR knowing the first 2-3 sets won't require maximal effort. (I.e., you don't have to psych up for a MR quite in the way you would for a straight set.)

Also, for those who get anxious about *having* to do certain exercises all the time (in a specific rotation), the option to choose the MR on the fly reduces this stress and also ensure you're not doing exercises that don't feel right (e.g., b/c of wear and tear / niggles or because of whatever exercises were done previously). So, you can adapt your training with exercise selection in essential a common sense way, rather than being locked into an exercise that you "must" do.

And the variety of a different set type (three in the system vs. just heavy and light) also makes the program more enjoyable, it seems. This is super important in my opinion for keeping motivation high and thus training efforts high.

-S