As I spent the morning preparing for today’s workout–yes, I have nothing better to do–I read, watched video, and pondered. Where is my newly created program weakest and what can be done to optimize it. The Juggernaut behemoth’s critique of Westside affirmed my own and added a new wrinkle about volume, but the bulb didn’t go off yet. I was on the fence about speed work as I wrote last night, so it was easy to dismiss the idea of including it in my template.
I watched Izzy explain how he no longer used Fatigue Percents, which is one of my favorite things, and I recall a rant post I wrote a while back when I first heard Mike T from RTS dismiss the Fatigue Percent concept as well, which was his own creation! So I figured Izzy dumped it because Mike did. But I pondered.
I then looked at my program and couldn’t come up with a secondary exercise to do after the Competition Bench. I need more volume for the pectoralis so I just picked DB Press. What was bugging me though was progressing on it. I know down the road I’m still going to be using roughly the same dumbbells, but more volume, I thought, that’s the ticket anyway. The first bulb went off. Volume is the total work performed. My memory flashed back to something Juggernaut guys said about Westside’s volume. That all those sets and reps of tricep work and lat work, etc. just didn’t make up for the volume missing from their main work with the bigger lifts. I quickly added up the total work I’d do performing 3×12 with 50-lb dumbbells and just compared it to the total work I did the other day with a light bench workout of 135×12, 125×12 and 115×12. It was a ridiculously easy workout, which nonetheless, was more than double the volume of the DB work!
I went back and looked at Izzy’s program and see how he replaced the Fatigue Percent backoff sets with volume work on the main lift. I considered how I was planning on doing singles in the Competition Bench today and after my top set was going to do back off sets until my lighter singles matched the RPE of my top set, i.e. Fatigue Percents. Well, instead of doing that and then wondering what to do as a secondary exercise, why not just hit the top single and then do some damn bench pressing as my “secondary exercise?!” I can build a shitton of volume up just doing some relatively easy bench press. We’re talking RPE 7 and below type of work. Even 3 sets at 155 or 165 would blow the doors off the volume I could accumulate by doing DB Presses or cable crossovers.
Well golly Bob Howdy… let’s go Bench!
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