[quote]captain slow wrote:
[quote]its_just_me wrote:
There’s many ways of skinning a cat. If you’ve got the time and are recovering being in the gym 5 or 6 times a week regularly, and bodyparts are responding, that split’s perfectly fine. Make sure you’re eating enough, this is often the factor in muscle gain. Was your old routine giving you decent gains on the chest…is the lagging chest recent only after changing the frequency?
Reason why my routine is different (has more days off and legs 1x/week) is because of outside factors - in the past year or two I’ve been renovating my house (plumbing/tilling/installing bathroom etc) in amongst my full time job and I found being in the gym 5+ days/week too much (wasn’t properly recovering).[/quote]
Feel like im recovering ok…im eating 400gs of protein a day (about 2xbw) and around the same of carbs. Probably drop the carbs though as im fat lol. I am getting more reps every week on most exercises.
Chest has always been a weak point for me, well pressing in general tbh. Have had rotator cuff in the past so i am now avoiding barbells in favour of dbs and machines.
Im thinking about doing my regular sets on chest and then doing a light set (if i do 4 plate on incline machine x7 reps i’ll drop it down to 2 plates and get amap). Might give hams a 2nd set aswel as I think this might help sum with them.
It would be great to hear your opinions on this :)[/quote]
Well done on the protein intake, not many manage that lol.
To be honest with you, I found db’s worked up to a certain point, but progress slowed. Went back to bb in the end, except did decline variation instead of flat which was better for my shoulders. Incline’s fine for my shoulders as long as I don’t go too far down. If I were you, I’d still stick to movements where you can progress in load decently (e.g. the machines if not the barbel).
Some people need more work/volume for certain bodyparts and it may be the case for you with chest. I wouldn’t worry too much about doing anything fancy for it other than adding in extra sets/exercises. So, you could do say a range of 8-10 reps, 2-3 working sets (near failure on first 1 or 2 working sets, then failure on the last), and/or do an extra exercise or two for it.
A few extra reps often helps with mind-muscle connection. Learn to control the load more, especially on the negative - if this means taking some load off then so be it. Movement should be piston/smooth like a machine (no jerks/pauses or loss of tension)…in fact, make sure you do all this first, then if still a problem, increase the volume.
