Scott Stevenson
Full Member
Don't feel too bad, I have been doing this on and off since it came out and still seem to do it wrong
You guys are doing just fine.... LOL
Another way to think of this.
Pick up the weight and tap into the muscle(s) that your'e trying to train. Let's say you're doing a unilateral cable pulldown.
Do you feel the lower lats engaging?... Are they sore there? How about the lateral aspects of the lats, that show from the front on a lat spread?... Did you hit these well in your previous back workout?... With the pump sets, we want to make sure you don't miss those spots.
Charles Glass (Venice Gold's) talks about filling in the holes with different exercises. You can do the same with pump sets, picking them based on how you feel before even doing the set, or even adjusting the set on the fly.
If you're doing a lat pulldown and feel like you want to make it more of a width exercise, sit more upright, pull your scapulae back, keeping your arms in a plane with your torso (kind of like when pulling the arms down before a rear double biceps the way some do it) and target that area, doing pulsing partial reps when deep into the movement, where you can strongly contract the lower lats (adding some back arch as needed at the bottom of the ROM).
You can see that if you're feeling out the set in this way, that trying to log progression could be a bit like spitting into the wind. So, the focus here is metabolic stress, more so than progressive overload, and connecting with the muscle in terms of where the training stimulus was / is lacking from the rest of the training as well as what your physique is showing you (where you lack development).
(This is a way to make good use of "foo-foo" isolation exercises, so to speak, b/c these are NOT easy done this way, which is why I keep them continuous, so folks are not doing widow makers and draining the nervous and endocrine systems.)
-S