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Old 09-14-2007, 09:41 AM
Jeffo Jeffo is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Holland
Posts: 99
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Hey Hops,

I have to say first off, that you've kicked some serious arse in the last 9 months. Your strength gains have definately been worth writing home about.

That said, all that progress over 9 months probably means it's time to change things a bit. Here's some stuff to consider.


I'd suggest following the example of your chins. Remember when you just couldn't add any weight to your chins? Well, instead of doing the 30 reps spread out (3x5 two days a week), you started doing them on a stress - performance set-up like the Texas Method (5x5 on stress day and 1x5 on performance day). You're still doing 30 reps, but it's organized differently. Follow that example with the rest of your lifts like you've suggested already. Ramp to a top triple, a top 5, or a few singles at the beginning of the week, and let the larger workload at the end of the week be the stress that drives progress. Till now, both your squat and bench days have always been pretty stressful.

Over the last 9 months you've always loaded then tapered. Normally you start off and increase the training load over a 4-6 week period, setting PR's in the process, get tired and then do a week or two taper, set some more PR's and then start loading again. This format works very well for a lower intermediate, as you've proven yourself, but you're probably starting to get beyond this now.

It's probably a decent idea to start including easy periods, and that includes decreasing the intensity as well, not just the volume; "pure deloads" so to speak. If you start using something like a 4 Day "Texas" style thing described above, take an easy week or two every 6 weeks or so. After the two easy weeks, back off a couple of weeks, perhaps change the perameters (from 5x5 to 8x3 for example), and build back up again. Four to six weeks of PR's might be about all you can handle at one run before fatigue starts becoming a problem. If you want to taper before going into the easy periods, you can give that a try as well. The main point is that the balancing act gets tougher as you go and you need to pay more attention to the easy periods to keep that ballance from getting too out of wack.

Just looking through my records on the Squat when I started training more Texas-like, I was able to progress fine on 1x5 on stress day for a while before fatigue became a problem. I then needed a 2 week easy period and a 3 week build up on 1x3 before I got to the equivalent of my 1x5 PR. After that, I was able to do 5 weeks of PR's at 3RM before I needed to deload again. I also needed to push the sets on stress day to get the last two weeks of PR's.

Anyways, that's a lot of junk to consider. I'm sure others will have other ideas about how to keep things going. Maybe I'll think of something else later.

Take 'er easy mate,
Jeff
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