FT Questions....

[Altamir]

Altamir,

Great questions.

WRT arms: How much weight have you gained?...

Thank you, as always for your awesome responses and I'm glad you thought they were great questions. I was worried I was analyzing things a little too much Two 6 week blasts, and one 2 week cruise (14 weeks) I've gained 6½lbs, which I consider pretty good and about average for what I have done in the past. The results with FT seem better though. But I get that they aren't going to be up an 1" or even 1/2" with that sort of weight gain.

Also, if you consider arms to be a weak point, they may be growing in unison with everything else, but you simply perceive them to be lagging in growth but they "lag" in general, so you're sensitive to arm size.

After thinking it over a bit after posting the question, I agree that they are probably at this point growing in unison with everything else, but overall they are behind the rest of my body. They lack that "pop" and it is discouraging as they are a very showy muscle group. My shoulders and traps seem to overpower them. (with legs overpowering everything) As you can tell, I am certainly sensitive to arm size! I'm not expecting miracles or only 6 weeks to put 1" on my biceps, but I would like to see if there is way I could encourage more growth and see if I can catch them up a bit.

You could do that for chest, but chest is a common one to have lag in gains and also lose strength the most when dieting down. I suspect this is because most guys have focused on chest training and strength over the years (or simply train harder with chest vs. other muscle groups) and this phenomenon reflects the law of diminishing returns. I would first start by putting in exercises that you don't normally do or adding variations on the ones you do:

E.g., Use bands or chains for BB presses.
Use DB Presses as a compound exercise for chest.
Use bands in HS machines for presses.
Come up with brand new exercises for muscle rounds and progress on those.

Also, simply switch the order of your exercise in your Loading sets, putting isolation exercises first if you haven't been (or vice versa) and then progress forward with those #s in your log.

(I agree - the bottom line is growth here. )

-S

These are all awesome ideas, thank you! Some of it was stuff I had been throwing around in my head thinking towards my next blast. I don't have any chains, but I've got buckets of EliteFTS bands. I'll put them to use! I did all pressing stuff for my MRs this last blast and I''m thinking that perhaps some more isolation stuff would be helpful. I did more pressing stuff to help give extra work to my triceps.

My shoulders often overpower my pressing movements, so doing isolation before compound lifts is a GREAT idea. Something I did in the past when I was running a more traditional style BB split and it worked well. Don't think this has been covered before, so forgive me if it has. This is more of a Tier 3 question. For loading, if doing isolation before loading, are we going to failure on isolation and then moving to compound? or stopping one rep shy? For example...

4 sets loading chest tier 3
Isolation to failure (or one rep shy?!)
Compound one rep shy
Isolation to failure
Compound to failure

Thank you once again Scott!