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Completed

More volume at lighter loads for isolation exercises

Ethan Dribble 6 years ago updated by Carl Juneau, PhD 5 years ago 4

I do wander about the approach to some of the isolation movements and in particular things like lateral raises where I feel that more volume at lighter loads is almost certainly better, yet the the algorithm can be quite aggressive in pushing the numbers up.  It seems all of the lifts are following roughly the same model, though obviously not everything can progress as much as compounds and certain movements definitely benefit from more volume.

I'm usually supplementing separate work for these groups.  So I wonder if in the future some attention might be paid to favoring more volume on things like calves that can use it.


At the end of the day, your app is great and it's honestly the foundation my training, though I do supplement around it with things I'd like to target a bit more or can handle greater frequency (arms).  It's pushed a ton of my compounds up and I specifically credit things like ridiculously high rep deadlifts and squats for greatly increasing my conditioning and growing my 1RMs by a huge amount.

I also love and evangelize rest-pause training now.  Anyway, keep up the good work and have a nice day!

Answer

Answer
Completed

Thanks for voting for this feature -- it's done!

You can now customize isolation exercises for more volume at lighter loads. To do so:

- Tap "..." next to an isolation exercise
- Tap "more"
- Toggle on "Use custom reps"
- Set reps to any high range, e.g. 15-25

If you're on Android, you can update now. If you're on iPhone, you'll have to wait 2-3 days for Apple to approve it. To update:

- Open the store app on your phone
- Search for Dr. Muscle
- Tap update

Now would be a great time to suggest and vote for our next feature. If you'd like to do that, please visit: https://muscle.userecho.com/communities/1-submit-your-feedback/topics#.

Really appreciate your support and advice. Thanks!

Carl Juneau, PhD
Founder of Dr. Muscle

Answer
Completed

Thanks for voting for this feature -- it's done!

You can now customize isolation exercises for more volume at lighter loads. To do so:

- Tap "..." next to an isolation exercise
- Tap "more"
- Toggle on "Use custom reps"
- Set reps to any high range, e.g. 15-25

If you're on Android, you can update now. If you're on iPhone, you'll have to wait 2-3 days for Apple to approve it. To update:

- Open the store app on your phone
- Search for Dr. Muscle
- Tap update

Now would be a great time to suggest and vote for our next feature. If you'd like to do that, please visit: https://muscle.userecho.com/communities/1-submit-your-feedback/topics#.

Really appreciate your support and advice. Thanks!

Carl Juneau, PhD
Founder of Dr. Muscle

Hi,

I'm very glad this update is finally in place. One thing I noticed when I removed the warm-up sets for excercises done later in the workout is that the timing does not sync. So for instance, I could have 0 warm-up sets and 5 working sets for excercise X. When I did the first working set, the countdown was only 35-40 seconds. The second set had a countdown of 60 seconds. It was only at the 3rd working set the timing would be correct (120-180 seconds).

Is this something you could look into? If removing the warmup sets, it should automatically start the countdown for the working sets, i.e. be longer than 35 seconds as when doing warmup.

Great catch Tomislav! We've already fixed that bug, and we're about to roll out the fix in beta (give it 3-4 days). Look for a public release in 7-10 days. Until then, you could work around the issue by ignoring the timer, or changing its options this way:

- Toggle "automatch reps" off
- Set timer to 25 seconds

You should now have a timer for 25 seconds on all sets.