Tuesday, March 7, 2023

High-Rep Volume PRs. Week 1. Session A.

sRPE @6
BW - 214

Squats - 
315X1 @7
185X14 @6

Press - 85X8 @6

Decline CG Cambered Swiss Bar - 115X12 @7.5

Rower - HIIT; 9 rounds / 16 minutes

Intro week and just hitting 1 of each work set.

In addition to working for fairly novel Volume PRs, I'm also scaling everything down.  Looking for a simpler format that I can build back onto. 

Starting off with 4 sessions per week, 2 of my main movements per session with 1-2 Supplement/Accessory slots, and conditioning. 

5-6 sessions per week was no longer proving sustainable.  So I'm tearing my program down to the studs and building back up based on some stuff the Data Driven Strength crew put out there:
- Strength focused work is specific to the test (likely similar movements/rep ranges), may only require single digit sets per week, can likely be done further from failure, and will still contribute to hypertrophy.
- Hypertrophy focused work is generalizable to the muscles being worked, likely needs 10-20 sets per week, and should be biased closer to failure.

An example of how that is playing out in this block:
Bench - 4 sets @7
Press- 4 sets @6-8
Dips - 4 sets @6-8
CG Decline Cambered Bar (Dips supplement) - 2 sets @~8
OH Extension (Triceps accessory) - 2 sets @8-10

In this layout, each of my 3 main pressing movements get 4 sets, and overall hypertrophy gets 16 sets.  That's actually only 3 fewer sets than last training block when I was training 5 days a week, and 5 fewer sets than BBM Powerbuilding 1.1 where I was training 6 days a week, and which was one of the most successful training blocks I had in 2022.

The shakier set up is on lower body where I'm assuming that Squat, Deadlift, and Toes-to-Bar share enough musculature to provide a hypertrophy stimulus for each other.  But those are also generally my best lifts and have more room to plateau or regress while I figure out a more sustainable way to train.

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