FT Questions....

[Scott Stevenson]

Thanks!! It's exactly why I love the system so much. Just enough guidance to keep my nutty head from getting too off track, but enough freedom to make it personal. Can't ask for much better than that!!

As to our previous topic about going lower carb and then a training session. I upped my calories the last day and I had a much better training session right out of the gate today. I think it also helps that I'm a little deeper into my IC at this point. But things felt locked in and ready to roll. Thanks once again as always for the guidance. I'll make sure to make note of our discussion, and whenever I start to try and cut and adjust accordingly!

Excellent! Glad to see you found a solution. Very nice.

This is interesting. I had the exact same experience with chest over my last 2 blasts (chest just dying near the end of the blast, but really only on loading sets - by dying I mean NOT getting more reps, or even getting 1 LESS rep than the previous attempt). Muscle rounds for chest were still generally grinding higher on just about every pressing exercise. I actually experimented with training chest tier 1 for pump sets (I tend to go HARD (ie. make them GLORIOUS) on pump sets - and chest is one muscle that I really can nail on say a pec fly machine), but that didn't really seem to help at all. I also tried putting a day in between loading days (ie. Monday/Wednesday rather than Monday/Tuesday) and this didn't seem to make any difference either. Other loading lifts such as Rack Deads, barbell row, weighted pullups, and even most shoulder pressing exercises I am still progressing on.

A few things that I suspect are contributing to chest: for a period of time, I had a hip injury on my left leg, so took about 2 blasts off of any squatting/leg pressing. I basically just did pump sets for legs using various leg extension machines and it got progressively better over time. During this period of time, all of my pressing movements increased very nicely (Flat BB, Incline BB, and Decline BB). So my numbers were moving up basically at 5lbs per cycle of that particular loading exercise (which for me with chest, is VERY satisfying progress) and I was able to add some nice numbers to each lift. Over the last 2 blasts, I was able to get back into squatting for Loading sets since my hip healed up, and worked in BB squat, Hack squat (the variation where you face the pads/inward), and Smith squats with feet placed slightly further forward (the smith is angled). I've never had a problem with leg strength/development relative to the rest of my body, so all of my squat loading exercises are already higher than they were before I had the hip injury, however, since I've added the squats back, all chest gains (on loading sets) have ground to a halt. (Back and shoulders have been progressing, however). Granted they ground to a halt at those higher numbers from when my hip was injured, but literally no progress on these since squatting again.

I also got a standing desk at work in December (which helped a ton with my hip issue), however, I have bumped up calories and the scale has been moving. I have gone from about 240 to just shy of 250 over the last 2 blasts, and definitely see quality mass gains (esp. side delts and lats, both areas I really focused hard on), so I'm not entirely sure it's a caloric issue.

My thoughts on working around this are:

1. Change upper body loading to do isolation exercises first (I think there is a large psychological factor involved here too for me, knowing that I need to beat the previous week, and have been struggling to do it - kind of a defeated mindset going in). Like Scott says, that way I can kind of reset the log book.
2. Possibly toss out one or more of the barbell exercises (likely decline as sometimes it can tweak my shoulder) to give myself a mental break from having to beat a loading set on a barbell each week.
3. Train legs at tier 1 (this I have been doing already, and legs are progressing nicely).

Other notes: I generally train at Tier 2 basic, sometimes upping to Tier 3 for the last 2 weeks to over reach. This last blast I did tier 2 up to week 4, then Tier 2 turbo for weeks 5 and 6 (which I absolutely LOVED!).

Does this seem like a logical solution, or is there something that I'm missing here?

Those are all great tactics, IMO. Knowing your training history, I'm totally cool with you mixing up Tiers as the above to see what works best for you personally. It would be silly for me to try to dictate that you not deviate when you're not making gains when following the program as set out in it original format.

A few general thoughts:

The Loading set exercises are to be rotated through until one plateaus, after which you'd drop them. If, for instance re-ordering ISO versus Compound exercises still doesn't restart progression, then it could be time to pick a new exercise to put in the Loading set rotation.

Loading sets exercises are to be your own personal "go to" exercise for training heavy and putting on size. It may just be that for chest, for instance, that using a very non-traditional "compound" exercise may be what works best for you (is your "go to" exercise). This might mean using DB's to to a press-fly (press up, fly down) or even doing a cable press of some sort.

Strength gains in different exercises simply may not follow the same relative course. Stan Efferding, for instance - one of the strongest guys to power lift - really didn't increase his Deadlift much at all during the course of his lifting career (or at least he said in an interview in the past year or so).

-S