FT Questions....

[Altamir]

In the section about MRs it says one can keep it very random and fresh or one can keep a lift in for a while and hammer at it until they get very strong at it and it shows in their physique.

I have always been of the opinion that getting brutally strong at an exercise is the best way to see muscle growth in that area. I am toying around with the idea of making the MR exercises the same exercises or similar to the loading exercises of the previous week..ergo you hit that same exercise once every 1.5 weeks on average instead of once every 3 weeks, but you're hitting it in different ways (higher rep rest-pause vs heavy loading).

E.g. if I do incline bench, machine row, pulldowns, db shoulder press for loading exercises of the first week then in the MR workout of the 2nd week (1.5 weeks later) I would do incline bench, machine row, pulldowns, smith shoulder press (because DB pressing wouldn't be good for MRs). Again different way to go at it but allows me to get even stronger on those core exercises. Additionally since we have 3-6 different loading exercises per muscle group this still provides quite a bit of variability especially when you consider the varying exercises of the pump sets.

What do you guys think? I like it but I don't want to do something clearly off from the program's intentions.

I like it a lot, personally and I started doing something very similar. As long as you can keep progressing this way, and it works for you, do it (also it doesn't hurt!). When I initially started I had a huge boost to all my shoulder presses. I think at the time I was only rotating 4 lifts for MRs and 3 of those were also the same lifts as loading. I saw a very big and fast progression for a few months. Then my shoulders got a little burnt out (this is half my own fault, over aggressive stretching), progress stalled. I hit a cruise, and I added a little more variety and everything started moving forward again, slow but surely.