FT Questions....

[mentalflex]

Yeah, I saw that that was going on.

4 work sets for that Tier and he was doing 4 different exercises. He has his own gym so he can get away with that, but it would significantly slow you down d/t the loading of all the weight and the warm-ups (which iw would suggest, simply for the sake of safety.)

The zig zagging should not be terribly complicated and frankly, that's far too many exercises for loading to try to keep track of, IMO.

E.g. for Chest, we're talking about 3 go to exercises (A, B, C) rotation and isolation exercises in between. The isolation exercise could be the same, but this could be another way to vary things / fine tune the program. PLUS, from a practical standpoint, it's gonna be pretty common at most gyms that it's a pain in the butt to secure more than one machine at a time.

Again, for chest, you can drag some DB's over the bench you're using and do DB flies. OTOH, that might not be possible if you need to warm-up near the DB area (and can't secure a bench where you're doing a BB or smith press AS WELL AS one over where the DB's are). With a partner this is more doable.

HOWEVER, when securing your "go to" LOADING exercise and you need to use another isolation exercise, you can almost surely find something that you can just jump in on, even if you have to do a couple "warm-up" reps to be ready. (I'd suggest in this case, using an impromptu isolation exercise, to keep the reps higher).

So, you might end up, on a day when incline BB press is your go to exercise, doing this:

Incline BB
Machine Pec Deck (machine is open)
Incline BB
Cable Cross-over (Machine is open)

---------

NOTE: THE BELOW IS IN THE CONTEXT OF TIER III TRAINING

Someone who is trying progress with loading sets on 4 DIFFERENT exercises on each of 3 exercise rotations (A, B, C) for that particular muscle group, is dealing with 12 different exercises to progress on.

I'm talking about using THREE exercises (3 go to ones) at a time, with the isolation exercises being in there as a variable stimulus. At the very least, if you're doing the Go to Exercise FIRST for your first loading set, you've got your marker of progress there (stopping a rep shy of failure).

For those who need to do an isolation exercise FIRST, this can be one they do each time (at least for a given Go To Loading set exercise) and perhaps for the other isolation sets. This way, that's a constant and if you go up on the isolation exercise AND the first set of the Go to Loading set Exercise (1st two sets), you know you're on the right track.

-S

Sweet baby jesus! Thank you for the detailed response!!!!