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Originally Posted by Phil
but I think your point is that by the time I'm back up to my plateau point the way I was going to, I could have been there and past doing it your suggested way.
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That's part of it. But it's more than that. The purpose of a back off is to just get a little recovery but not to LOSE anything strength wise. And in this case we're talking neural adapatations which are the first to come and the first to start going. This is of course different for everyone depending on many factors including training status. For instance, initial beginner gains may stick around a lot longer than later gains of a more trained individual.
But regardless all you want to do is recover and go past where you were. If you drop the intensity too much (and it is hard to say how much is too much) but say more than 15 percent and certainly if you remain at lower intensities for a period of weeks is is VERY probable that you are not just recovering and adapting but are detraining (a little) and then simply retraining. The result is you just get where you were before but you don't break the plateau or only break it for a very short period.
If you needed more of a backoff what you could do is instead of building back up very slowly you can just have the first one or two backoff workouts be lower volume but in general keeping the intensity somewhat high.
The 3x3 is the same general concept where you are dropping the volume but raising or keeping the intensity the same. In this case I doubt it would work because of the frequency. You'd need to drop a squat workout or change it to a lighter squat. Or keep the weight the same at the lower volume. But even then it is not guaranteed to work very well on this set up and certainly no better than a simple back off in the way I've described. I would save that for a later time when you want to "peak" and deload rather than simply continue progression.
The reason is that it's just not the optimum way. This is not an extended loading protocol. This is a workout to workout protocol. The best way to handle stalls is in a way that is as similar to the normal way of progressing in the program as possible. You don't want sudden changes in the type of stimuly your introducing. You just want a little rest while staying as close to your recent 5RM as possible while still allowing that rest to take place.