Vertical pulls are the mirror image of vertical pushes. Instead of straightening your arms overhead, you’re pulling them down to your sides.

A well-designed bodybuilding routine includes both compound and isolation movements rather than relying on one or the other.

Most coaches and experts these days choose a much easier approach requiring minimal math: counting the number of hard sets, sometimes called set volume.

You can’t know when you’re close to failure unless you sometimes push a set as hard as you can. To do that, you need an accurate way to plan for and manage your proximity to failure.

My recommendation is simple: Inhale during the eccentric (negative) and exhale during the concentric (positive).

RIR and RPE

If your goal is to maximize muscular development, you shouldn’t use compound or isolation exercises exclusively. Use both.

Far too many lifters just let the negative happen, succumbing to gravity rather than controlling the weight on the way down.

There are several practical ways to implement failure training. You might take the final set of one or two exercises per workout all the way to zero RIR. After a couple of weeks, take those sets to RPE 9 (one RIR). Or you can run a short training block (two to four weeks should be plenty) where you do fewer sets of each exercise, but take every set