I'm wondering why there is not more activity and interest in this in general. There seems to be more interrest on other boards but some of it seems to have went down a winding path or two. But since there is bound to be an inevitable comparison being made to the ONLY other intermeditate 5x5 template that many have heard of (Madcow's) I wanted to clear up some very bad misconceptions.
One. This is not Madcow's except for Monday being 5x5 sets accross and Friday being working up to a RM pr...lol. They are completely different in some fundamental ways.
I think that many people might choose not to do this because they think it is a higher volume version of Madcow or something. Nothing could be further from the truth. What is important is that on this program the Monday and Friday workouts are NOT tied together from a linear progressive standpoint. What happens Friday is not decided by what went on Monday but rather by your ability AT THAT TIME. That's why it's called a "PR". Or, I should say, based on my philosophy, an attempt at a PR but at least no regression from previous perfomances. Call it a single heavy set.
Mondays are tied to Mondays. That is the fundamental progression. Very simple. Wednesday is somewhat a recovery day and can and should be manipulated to suit the needs of the trainee at any given time. Deads on Wednesday, even at one set, are a wild card when it comes to recovery but if you don't get too caught up in making fantastic PR's each and every Friday it will work out fine. I've seen other examples with deads of Fridays.....
But deads can be put on Friday for those who can pull it off as Rip himself has said. I have placed deads on Friday very successfully also. This allows Wednesday to be a true recovery day. But I had just as much success with placing deads on Wednesday so I may not be the person to go by, especially since deads are my best exercise and will move when all else fails. Frankly, I don't see too many making consistent "progress" on max sets doing deads, squats, and bench all on one day.
Fridays can be tied to Fridays but need not have a "progression". As a matter of fact it may be better to think of Friday as a max attempt rather than a PR. Hence my "may or may not be a PR" guideline. But if you look at Sentinel's journal you'll see that he basically added a rep to a 1RM every Friday for a while. So every Friday was a PR for most of it. I couldn't have done that but it speaks to the effectiveness of this simple setup and I reckon how full of piss and vinegar he is.
I DO NOT however, recommend that to someone just coming off SS or who is new to very high intenstiy. They would be better off sticking to 5RM's for a while on Friday (like the writeup says) and later on maybe going for a 4 or a 3. Switching it up after that.
And that leads me to another question. Isn't the 1x5 on Friday the same as Madcow's except you do 5 reps instead of 3? Well, no. I've already laid out the difference in progression so that should really be enough but there seems also to be confusion surrounding the difference between ramped sets (which some people erroneoulsy call pyrammiding) and a max set with warm ups.
The ramped sets can be thought of as a kind of warm up leading up to a higher top set but the primary difference between that and your typical warm up is that the ramped sets COUNT. They are part of the workload and if you added them all up you'd come up with a certain relative intensity for the entire work group. But the top set while being much higher than 5x5 sets across is not likely to be a MAX set. The warm up should be (drum roll please) what works for you, albeit given some basic parameters and common sense.
So, for instance, if I were going for a max Friday set of 350X5 on squats I might do something like this:
Empty Bar X5X2 (I always start with empty bar)
150X2
175X5
260X2
280 to 290X1
350 working set
That is what I might do. If it looks a little weird to you that is because you are not me. Some people might do better with having their last warmup set being a little closer to their working set than I did here. Some people might need to stay further away. I'd say start with your last warm up set at about 75% though, and go from there. Generally I don't use any more reps in a warmup than I intend to do in my working set. And remember the specific warmup for a movement is to get you prepared for that warmup. Your body should already be "warm" before that and there are better ways to do that then 2 sets of 10 to 12 on squats...
If you are a person who warms up for a max attempty using the same increments as you would on 5x5 ramped sets then you are really selling yourself short. The build up or warm up for the attempt should just be enough to prepare you for it. It shouldn't tax you or tire your out. This should be obvious. Only the max attempt "counts" on Friday. Just one set.
On Friday of the TM you could adopt ramped sets if you wanted but the volume would be raised and therefore the whole thing would be thrown out of kilter. Friday is simply a single heavy set. The volume needs to be much lower.
Again the progress is Monday to Monday and Friday to Friday. The stimulus from Monday should spur the PR on Friday but that is the only connection.
I personally don't make a big thing about continued progress on Friday being the be all and end all. Rippetoe stresses Friday progress in PP but it really seems like a perfect world scenario. Perhaps is you have Rip himself guiding you it would be easier. But your ability to make new PR's even with the most perfect training routine hinges on too many variables to expect it to be full speed ahead the whole time.
Maybe if you are perfect and always get more then enough sleep and eat like a perfectly tuned nutrition machine than perhaps but for those of us who don't actually make a living from training we should stick to this universe. It's also very easy to say "make PR's" when you are only talking about one exercise as per Rip's example in the book. That's not a criticism, just saying that Rip needs to give more example for intemediates....maybe in the next book. I could personally do with 100% less graphs and 500% more specific recommendations (albeit to a generalized audience). But he seems to be writing more for coaches so maybe they find the graphs useful, lol.
So the fundamental thing for me is if you are making continued progress on Monday, bringing your deads and such along on Wednesday and not actually regressing on Friday then you are damn sure making progress. Every attempt should be made to make pogress on Friday but I wouldn't start fixing things that ain't broken on the other days to do it. A PR on Friday can cement the gains made and even spur the ability to make new ones, but a PR in itself is not likely to result in much new fitness. It is too transitory. To put it another way, you might hit 500 on dead tommorow and that is good and will do a lot for you but it ain't going to guarantee you doing 510 the next time.
The other question bound to come up is "why 5x5 sets accross on Monday". Why not something else? Well, because 5x5 sets accross works really good
and it sounds better than 4x6. Go ahead and try 4x8 and we can compare notes later. Perhaps someone else can do 10X3. No, anything is possible but it's hard to find a better way than 5x5 sets accross. You get enough volume to spur progress but at a nice high relative intensity. At least until progress halts then the something else that works becomes "better".