If you're not doing overhead pressing on Wednesday then I assume you are doing incline benching? If that is so then trust me that's a whole lot worse for your shoulders. The pressing work on Wednesday doesn't have to be very much...you can do as little as 2 sets of 5. OR you could also do higher reps at a weight that doesn't necessarily represent a maximal effort but balancing out the front pressing with overhead pressing is really beneficial to the health of your shoulders and quite frankly I count overhead pressing as very important.
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Originally Posted by Hrdgain
How do you feel about taking friday off from time to time, or dropping the wieghts down for that perticular day ... as a deload of sorts. I think that would give me optimum time to heal, and not hinder my numbers come the next monday. just a thought.
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Well I think that's an excellent idea but not as a piecemeal bandaid. When it comes down to it either you are continuing to progress or you are not. Theoretically if you are progressing then enough recovery is taking place and fatigue is backing off enough to see that progression. You may have bad days and good days within that because you may be able to run the program very well but hardly anyone can perfect all the behavoiral factors at all times. That's one reason it is important when you miss a rep or something that you give it a few tries before you assume you've hit an unsurmountable wall.
With that in mind, imo, the best way to run it is to keep the basic progression the same while keeping in mind some of those things I mentioned in the above posts. And when you can progress by no other means you back off the intensity a few weeks to allow for extra recovery and you get it moving again.
If you wanted to back off on Friday once and a while it wouldn't take anything very drastic. You could simply drop a set and not load the bar then hold over your weights from that Monday to the next. Sure, that would give you extra recovery. But you interupt the progression. If you decided to back off on Friday like I described and then loaded the bar on Monday that would probably work but the next Friday you could find yourself not quite able to load again.
That is the basic problem on this routine with it's double progression. Monday is tied to Friday. Another point while I'm on the subject is all of these things I am talking about are designed to continue progression for another 2 or 3 weeks at most.
Better to adjust Monday (or Wednesday). I mentioned widening the increments. That may not appeal to everyone. Another thing you can do is drop the third and fourth set down to 2 or 3 reps. That would allow a few more PRs. These are subtle changes that make a big difference.
After it becomes apparent that you have plateaued then a backoff will work (but not such a huge one like 25%) to get it going again but it is doubtful you will be able to use the same little adjustments after that to move forward very much so it is at that point that adjustments in Monday AND Friday could allow you to reap some further benefits.
Best thing to do (what I have done also) is to change Monday to 5 sets across. This would be with the weight sets back to some weight less than whatever you top set of 5 stalled at. You have to use your judgement but you want to build up a little so you start conservative. Then Friday would be ramping up to the top set of 5. Wednesday would be lighter squats, front squats, or whatever and one set of deads. Pretty much the same. But progression would be Monday to Monday and Friday to Friday. Separate. Friday would not govern what you do on Monday.
That should work for a while longer. And you'd be amazed at how long you can keep this shit up! But by the time you get that far you'll probably be burnt on it and want to switch it up for a little while.