Planning my 3rd cycle

[EL_VIEJO]

I'm currently in the 10's of my 2nd cycle and I'm already thinking about what I'm going to do in the next cycle. I know a lot of people here, including myself, do A/B workout routines, but does anybody here do A/B/C workouts? There are some exercises that I've never done before that I'd like to incorporate into my next cycle. Namely - front squats, lunges, power cleans, face pulls, and jump shrugs. I have a limited amount of time to workout. I workout on Sundays, Tues, and Thurs. On Sundays I have all the time I need, but on the other 2 days I have a max of 50-55 minutes of actual workout time. I've been doing 6 exercises per w/o + some ab work. If I step up the pace by cutting down on rest time I could squeeze in 1 or 2 more exercises. However, from a recovery stand point I couldn't incorporate these particular exercises without eliminating others, so I came up with the following A/B/C schedule.

A B C
Dips Bench Press DB Incline Bench Press
Inverse Rows Face Pulls DB Rows

Lunges Front Squat Back Squat
Dead Lift Power Cleans Romanian Deadlifts

Military Press DB Press (N.G.*) Arnold DB Press
Chins (N.G.*) Pull-ups Chins

Jump Shrug Scaptions** Overhead Shrug
Preacher Curls Incline Curls Hammer Curls

* N.G. = Neutral Grip (Palms facing each other)
** Scaptions - it's somewhere between a DB lateral raise and a front raise maintaining a neutral grip. Your arms should be about 30 degrees more toward the medial than in a lateral raise. The variation I want to do includes a shrug at the top of the movement.

The curls and the shrugs would be done only if time allows.

Am I over-complicating things and trying to cram in too many variations? Is this a 'Complicate and Lose' scenario? Any comments or criticisms would be welcome.

 

[quadancer]

I doubt that the variety issue has been settled yet. I'm from the camp of faith in training a muscle, and that involves hitting it one or two ways consistently; I sort of doubt that you can improve on that. As we like to say:
Muscles don't get confused.
Jump shrugs? I prefer power shrugs. Pyramided up to 455x3 tonite and know I can go a lot higher soon. Those are as much assistance to the traps as I'd like to go; it's almost like cheating, but it works. On a straight pull right now I'd probably only be hitting around 400 - and that's without the hold at the top.
Some of your variety is very functional: using romanians to build up your deads. I've begun using bottom squats to build my hole strength where I'm weak, but not for hypertrophy directly.

 

[EL_VIEJO]

<div>
(quadancer @ Dec. 22 2007,17:49)</div><div id="QUOTEHEAD">QUOTE</div><div id="QUOTE">I doubt that the variety issue has been settled yet. I'm from the camp of faith in training a muscle, and that involves hitting it one or two ways consistently; I sort of doubt that you can improve on that. As we like to say:
Muscles don't get confused.
Jump shrugs? I prefer power shrugs. Pyramided up to 455x3 tonite and know I can go a lot higher soon. Those are as much assistance to the traps as I'd like to go; it's almost like cheating, but it works. On a straight pull right now I'd probably only be hitting around 400 - and that's without the hold at the top.
Some of your variety is very functional: using romanians to build up your deads. I've begun using bottom squats to build my hole strength where I'm weak, but not for hypertrophy directly.</div>
Jump shrugs are used in preparing for doing the snatch, which I have fantasies about doing someday.

I don't subscribe to the muscle confusion theory either. I was thinking more in terms of not doing the exact same thing every w/o to keep things a little more interesting, but not doing anything TOO different. In other words, doing different exercises that basically work the same muscles. I was also considering going to the other extreme and doing only 1 routine and just alternating squats and DLs. I'm still in the thinking stage. I've got 6 more weeks before I have to decide what to do. I guess building muscle and getting stronger in the basic lifts could also be interesting.

Thanks for your input.

 

[scientific muscle]

You may find that your neural-strength increases are less using  3 different sets of exercises.  And neural-strength allows increased force-output which translates to more muscle-fiber strain.  That is why I am currently doing the same exercises every workout and simply dropped frequency to 2x/week to allow better recovery.

A few months back I got my bench up quite a bit by benching every workout, I don't think I would have had as good results if I had alternated bench with something else every other workout or every third workout.

 

[Lol]

I am doing a sort of A, B, C for legs and back and an A, B for chest and shoulders schedule. I have been pushed for time recently so I seem to end up doing just one or two exercises each session but I try to do more than three sessions a week. I will be sticking with these exercises for the foreseeable future but I may add in cleans again at some point (I might alternate them with deads so that I am only deadlifting once a fortnight).

Front Squats
Bench
Pendlays
Press

Deads
Dips
Chins
Upright Rows

ATG Squats
Press or Upright Rows
One-Arm DB Rows
Bench or Dips