You guys and your spreadsheets!

What Hardgain has is fine. Subtracting back 2.5% each week from you max for 3 weeks. But lets not get hung up on percentages. 2.5% is a good round way but for most of us that falls somewhere between 5 to 8 pounds. You could go back each week by an even 10 pounds and be fine without even considering a percentage. 6 pounds each week or 7 pounds it hardly makes a difference in your recycling weeks.

Looking at the squat I agree with Anuj. If I got around 210 on week one I'd probable drop it to 200. Because my experience with these types of programs tells me a little conservative bent takes you a long way in the weeks to come. But it will work. The fact is once I get started I DON'T worry too much about what my projected max was. I start progressing and KEEP progressing for as long as possible. That is what it's all about. This is NOT a nine week program. That's just as far as the spreadsheet calculates to give you an idea. It's a however long you can go program.

If you were to use 10% as your number then that would be over the whole 4 weeks. In hargain's workout that would start him at 230 and he could add whatever to that to hit 255 at week 4. But doing 10% each week would mean you are cycling back around 70%. WAY too much. But you could cycle back up to around 25% and be fine. I personally like to keep it around 10 but maybe drop it back a little depending on my training status. Especially if you're estimating. But what it comes down to is ramping up 5 to 10 pounds each week until you arrive at you max. It's hardly rocket science.

It is, however, a mistake to view the first few weeks to rigidly because you can never fully predict your training response. But when you are plugging away at week 7, for instance, or beyond, and have yourself a heatlhty new max, the exact weight you did on week 4 is of minor importance unless that weight was too heavy which could have cut short you progression significantly or cause you to plateau and cycle back on a lift much sooner. Which is what Anuj was getting at. So the long term progression is more important than you intensity at any one time. And week 4 being a little lighter is much better than it being a little heavy.

Keep in mind that the progression you use in the build up weeks DOES NOT necessarily have to correspond to the progression beyond that. People have gotten this way too static. You do what ever keeps you progressing.

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If you act sanctimonious I will just list out your logical fallacies until you get pissed off and spew blasphemous remarks.