Always like to hear from you on anything, very refreshing. And thanks for not giving too much mention to these young folks(especially the egotistical, drug addicted roid, bad eating habits etc.). Lots of other influencers/PT/BB always give them so much air time and not speaking of the flaws they are doing. 🤷🏽♂️
Looks like a quality piece of kit! My only observation is that when you were doing the seated rows there didn't seem to be a whole bunch of clearance between the the weight peg and the stopper. For quite short men or women I could see this being an issue, also it could impede Arnold style rows where you really reach forward and stretch out the lats.
Just depends on how much chain slack you add to the carabiner. I probably had just as much as I needed, no more and no less. Plenty of wiggle room to toy with though, same as any other cable row setup I've dealt with.
I kinda liked the grey gunmetal looking rack more in terms of aesthetics. Also kinda curious what it was and what the dip handles for that rack were called.
I haven't tried it with pulldowns now that you mention it! I'm sure the pulley would be just as smooth as with every other movement. The only problem would be figuring out a way to anchor your legs down so that you don't get pulled up into the air by the heavy stack.
For me it's mostly just based on how motivated I am to do a particular variation! In general, if my last effort was not a true max effort then I'll wait 2-3 weeks..if my last effort at it was *TRUE* max effort, shit, I probably won't do it again for months.
1 - Nutrition. You cannot be in a meaningful calorie surplus, not for long amounts of time. Eat at maintenance calories. 2 - Compensatory acceleration. Do things FAST, with low amounts of time under tension. Do more sets, less reps. 10 sets of 3, not 3 sets of 10, (and do them FAST and EXPLOSIVE). 3 - Concentric only movements, squat from the bottom pins, dead stop bench etc. Remove some muscle damage and thus some hypertrophy by eliminating the eccentric. 4 - Plyos. Focus on jumping, clean and jerks, snatches etc, rather than the pump and time under tension. Calisthenics for low reps works too. 5 - Periodize your training, split it into different training blocks. It's winter, and now is the perfect time to eat a lot, sleep a lot, and move heavy weight for lots of reps. In the spring you could start to slim down, do more of what I've suggested above, and do more cardio (cardio, when done right, allows you to eat more to build muscle, but it can be a tricky business to balance that takes practice). Having said all that, unless you've got a weight class to stick to, and / or you want to be a twig, NOTHING works better for getting stronger than eating lots of food and doing lots of reps with lots of weight (and taking lots of drugs, if you're in to that). You may feel that you don't want that "get big" training just now... but.... you probably wont find out what you're really capable of, what kind of a monster you could be, until you get a lot bigger. You do that with lots of weight, lots of food and lots of reps, periodized with the things I mentioned above.
