The full Strong-15 run that starts Paul Carter's LRB 365 manual is complete.
The biggest difficulty and most important thing switching into this program is determining goals for the cycle. I switched from 531 to Carter's Ultimate Beastdom program last winter as well. I just don't have the experience to easily switch from a training max based approach to a goal based approach. When I did this last year, I charted my E1RM progress over the previous 531 cycles and used that to project goals for the strength phase of the UB program. This was based on the assumption of equal or better progress. It worked okay, but I had mixed results for a variety of reasons. Mostly related to poor form as I approached my goal weights. Again, inexperience.
It was a bit easier this time because Carter goes into a lot of detail around using what he calls the Every Day Max (EDM) as the baseline for the goals here. He is very much talking about feel and intuition about what you can lift, but after working in E1RM for so long, I still wasn't positive about what that should be because I was still getting 5-10 reps on all my 531 top sets. So this time I took my E1RM for each week of 531 for the prior 3 months and averaged it. I decided that my EDM should at least be in that
ballpark. I then set different, modest (I thought) goals for adding to each of them. It broke down like this:
Squat - EDM (3 month 531 avg.) 275. Goal - 285 (+10 lbs.)
Bench - EDM 200. Goal - 205 (+5 lbs.)
Deadlift - EDM 360. Goal - 365 (+5 lbs.)
I should note that although I averaged ALL my 531 weeks together, it occurred to me afterwards that it might have been smarter to only have used the 3rd week of each cycle since it's the heaviest. However, when I go back and look at that, those weeks yielded the highest E1RM of each cycle across the board. So this still seems fairly conservative.
Now the good news is that I didn't miss any lifts on the program. The not so good news is that Carter wants the final singles in Week 9 to be "crushed", and they really weren't. Here are the results by the numbers:
Final Squat - 265: This was really smooth and there was no doubt I would make the lift, however it was a bit slower than I might of hoped. Still probably my favorite result of the program.
Bench - 185: This is a true EDM for me in the sense that I've hit this weight on multiple occasions, including in Week 8 of this cycle. The real news here is that I set rep PR's on my back-off sets each of the last 3 weeks of the cycle.
Deadlift - 335: This was the biggest letdown. This matches my previous best actual lift, which is okay, and it was smooth, but it was really, really slow.
With the deadlift, it could be that I overestimated my EDM, or it could be just additional stress of heavy squatting before deadlifts. Regardless, I came up with a new way to track EDM for myself, that is SUPER-conservative and still allows me to have fun playing with programming spreadsheets. I've always tracked my Rep PR's, and now I'm just averaging the E1RM of all of those together to give me a result. Again, this yields amazingly conservative numbers because some of these Rep PR's are really old. However, if I'm going to buy into Paul Carter's sub-maximal philosophy for a whole year or more, then it seems like a decent way to go.
