Squats - 320X5, 5, 5
Bench - 210X5, 5, 5
Chin-Ups - BWX6, 5, 4, 4
Pull-Downs - 3 sets of 10 (straight-weight)
Barbell Curls - 45X10, 10
Squats went pretty well. Still trying to get better depth. Maybe marginal improvement on this day. Last set shown.
Bench was pretty tough. Got a lift-off for the last two sets just to try and save energy. Strength was there, just the medium volume/medium intensity set up for pressing movements on the middle day is always tough. Last set shown.
Decided to mix things up on Chins. I'd told myself I was going to get to 50 total reps on a day before I decided this volume approach wasn't working. Well 50 is an arbitrary number. I knew I needed to change it up, because I was starting to dread chinning at the end of this day. I consume a lot of stuff from various Starting Strength people, and SS adjacent stuff. Inspired by stuff Andy Baker wrote here, and also some of the Barbell Medicine stuff (recently splintered off from SS). The BM guys talk a lot about the importance of volume over intensity, and even over tonnage which is interesting. I don't consider myself nearly smart enough to really grok the big picture of half the stuff they present, and definitely not to experiment with on my own on the main lifts.
But for chins?
From what I gather, their point of view is that intensity doesn't matter nearly as much as volume. Specifically, that once work weight gets into the 70%+ range, it becomes largely equal in it's ability to drive hypertrophy. And that, after a proper novice phase, hypertrophy becomes far more important to strength gains than the neuro-muscular effects trained by super-high intensity. That singles, etc. are still important practice for strength sports, but take a lot more out of you than lower intensities that are just as effective at driving strength. In some ways, it reminds me a lot of Paul Carter's strength programming. i.e. Working up to 1-3 heavy singles, and then do a bunch of sub-max back-off sets.
So that's all to get down what I'm thinking about it at this moment. And that's why I'm moving to less sets of chin-ups (high intensity/stress) and adding in sets of pulldowns and chins to keep the overall volume up on the prime movers in the movement. I had been doing 8-10 sets of Chin-ups @ around 40 total reps. I'm moving that down to 4 initial sets here @ 19 total reps. Then I have 3 sets of pull-downs and 2 sets of biceps for a total of 9 sets "for chins." I will look to add reps to the chins until I get up to about 25 (per Andy Baker's link above). But if the 1st set reps aren't increasing and/or the total sets required to get my reps is plateauing or going up, then I will add a set to pull-downs and/or curls. If I get to 5+ sets of chins, 5 sets of pulldowns, and 3 sets of curls (Andy Baker, again), and there is no progress, I will have to add a 2nd day. I'll reset the 1st day back down to 4, 3, 2, and then both days will follow the previous progression, but the movements on the 2nd day will be those from Baker's 2nd day.
The only problem if figuring out where to put that if I'm on a 3 day split and Deadlifting twice a week. Maybe Intensity Day.
