FT Questions....

[Scott Stevenson]

I was wondering along the same lines as JLarge.
In order to fail close to 4 reps on the 6th set the 5th set is usually what many would consider a failure set.

Well, I'm not sure what to say to that.

If you get the 4th rep, then you didn't fail. If you failed, then you didn't get the rep... LOL

In other words, if you did a rep, bit was crappy, I'd not count it as a completed rep, and you'd need to drop the weight down to get the rest of the sets of the MR.

So just to be clear, on the method you state above, it's ok to fail on the 4th set or later but you don't drop the weight for the remaining sets to get to 6 total sets.
An MR set could consist of 4-4-4-4-2?

I'm not creating any new way to do MR's in my previous post.

For an MR, you would still do 6 sets (I think you're listing only 5 above), with ideally only ONE of them having a true failure rep. The weight drop should make the rest of the sets hard, but we want to make those VERY clean as far as form.

If you favor progressive overload with the MR's ONE way to do this is:

1.) pick a weight you can get the first three sets of 4 with, failing in the 4th set. (Thereafter you'd drop the weight to allow you to get the 4 reps in the 5th and 6th.

2.) Stick with that same weight for that exercise.

---You'll progress when you can get more reps in the set you fail in and/or get more sets before you reach failure.

It might go, week by week

4,4,4,2...4,4
4,4,4,3, 4,4
4,4,4,4,2, 4 (this drop might not be as much b/c you only need to get 1 more set of 4 with the lesser weight)
4,4,4,4,3,4
4,4,4,4,4, 2
4,4,4,4,4, 3
4,4,4,4,4,4

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now, you were just about to do all 6 sets of 4, so you can adjust weight the next time so you get at least 3 sets, failing the forth and progress in the same fashion as above.

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(Hope that clarifies?...)

-S