I’m finishing my first week of your Best Damn Workout Plan For Natural Lifters 2 and had a question about the myo technique, where you do as many microsets of 3 as possible. How many of these microsets is too many? I’ve done up to 6-7 of these, and with the structure of the program limiting volume, I worry if I am increasing the volume unintentionally. I guess a simple solution is to then increase weight but I worry about not hitting the 10-12 reps on the work set.
Can you provide some guidance on this? I just want to make sure I’m not doing too many microsets and increasing the volume. Hope all this makes sense.
Not CT, but I recall reading in his article about the program that if you get more than 5 micro sets, then it’s no good and you didn’t go close enough to failure in the set.
I’ve found that I can’t use the same rest intervals on the micro sets for every exercise. On some things 15 seconds isn’t enough to do more than one micro set but on others it’s fine.
The article actually says to rest 20 sec between micro sets but on a different thread CT said to take 3-5 breaths between each set.
Borge Fagerli is the originator of this technique and he suggests 6 deep breathes which, if you are anal enough, like me, to check, pans out at 15s. Interestingly, he has moved away from using this with moderate rep ranges and prefers higher like 20+ on the top set followed by sets of 4-5 AMAP. The theory is such sets constitute internal occlusion, i.e blood flow restriction. Another interesting difference is application. Fagerli believes they best sit on their own as a separate session as part of a DUP approach (heavy/medium/light).
Which is what is being done in BDW2… each muscle is hit 3x a week (or 3x in a 6 days cycle). Once heavy (rest/pause or clusters), once light (mTor) and once medium (myo-reps).
I get that Coach, and it works for me. I was pointing out Fagerli uses the Mike Zourdos DUP system where each training intensity (heavy/medium/light) has its own specific day. In this case, the light day would be myo reps day. He’s stated he believes this works better than a mixing and matching approach.
With that approach every exercise on a day would be rest/pause or clusters, then myo reps the next day, and mTor on day three of the week?
I don’t think I could handle an entire workout of mTor reps. I could do it, but I’d start to hate it and we all know how that ends. I regret days where I do three mTor sets in a session.
(I don’t regret the work once it’s done; I regret my poor planning.)