Hey @Paul_Carter
3 weeks into your program now, and I have a couple of questions:
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As I predicted, my technique on the Barbell bench isn’t really on point and that recently hurt my progress (I don’t feel confident doing the exercise, much less seeing as I’m doing it neck press style). I’m considering to switch to Smith machine neck press as my 50%-technique exercise for upper 1 workout. Can you see this hurting me long term? I’ve been avoiding barbell pushing exercises and using mostly DBs or the smith machine as they just feel better. However, seeing all the big guys regularly benching with Bb has me thinking that maybe this isn’t the best path. What do you say?
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I believe my strength may have gone down lately. For Incline db presses, I used to be able to do six reps with 32 kg DBs, followed by 8 reps with 24 kgs and then a very hard 10 reps with 22 kg DBs, all in a big dropset… And I was even cutting. Now I’m struggling to get 50 total reps for your 350 technique with 22 kg DBs! What may have happened? I know that as long as I’m going to failure I’ll still get results, but it puzzles me that I can’t nearly get the same weight for reps. If I only think that when starting the program I was debating as to whether to use 26 or 28 kg DBs… I’m not even close now.
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You gave me green lights as to adding some delt work at the end of upper body workouts. I’ve been sorta skipping on that as I always get to the end of the workout with virtually nothing left in the tank. I did indeed try your 25-15-10-rest-10-15-25 method for laterals in a couple of workouts, and it killed my delts big time! I did it with plates instead of DBs (1.25 kg, 2.5 kg, and 5 kg plates) because I feel like I can isolate my delts better with them. I tend to be trap dominant and I feel that with plates I can focus on pushing the arms away with the delts better (it also feels easier on the wrists). What other isolation exercises could I do for delts? I’m thinking that I could do like one isolation exercise for the front delts and one for the middle on upper 1, then one for the rear and one for the middle on upper 2. What do you think? CT’s growth factor sets seem effective, but you also have some interesting techniques for isolation work.