When I say old school, I mean the stuff that doesn’t have all the fancy set and rep schemes or any crazy alterations in weekly volume, but instead the 5x5s, the 7x3s, 5/3/1, all that stuff. Over the last 14 weeks, I experimented with my training based around a podcast I’d heard; Table Talk with Dave Tate and guest, Jeremy Hamilton.
First, I’ll go over the introduction to this idea and how I manipulated it for what I needed. Hamilton explained he was always keen on “building up his 80% max”. Essentially, pushing the top limit of what 80% technically was. The higher you can push that, theoretically, the higher you can push your 100%. The way he did this was using sets of triples, just a bunch of them. He’d start week 1 at 70%, doing as many sets of triples he could with minimal rest time until it got grindy. So with 70%, maybe he’d get 13 sets of triples for example. As soon as that last set, whatever number got slow, he’d take some time to rest, and immediately go into an AMRAP. No rest/pause, no time between reps, just going. He’d continue this week to week, increasing 2.5% each week until he got to 80%. There’s science and reasoning behind this I could get into, but I won’t because it gets confusing. Now for my take…
The way I thought of this was, I’m young, my nutrition is dialed in, and I can handle a similar loading idea, but I can also handle a slightly increased intensity at this point in my life so I thought I’d take the time to build my 85% instead. 85% felt more needed in my head as technically this is about the top end of your sets of 5. I took this reasoning and made it even more intense. I figured I’d work my 85% in the same principle, increasing 2.5% weekly from 75% for 8 weeks using the age old 5 sets of 5. To add onto this, my last meet was a poor performance as I didn’t get a lot of time between attempts and often was unprepared, so I took all my sets with only 3 minutes of rest between each. Knowing how intense this would be, and thinking about my weaknesses, I chose my compounds to fit into that, where I needed hip, back, and quad strength, I’d run SSB squats and sumo deadlift. Coming off a pec strain, I needed bench work, but with more shoulder and tricep involvement while I rehabbed, so I used close grip as my primary bench. Now, I didn’t want to completely lose out on the needs of my competition style lifts, I chose to have primer singles before my secondaries to allow technique work and ensure I still had the patterns ingrained with no issue when it was time to go back to competition style lifts. The results of this were a little inconclusive, and mostly hard to judge, just because instead of a top set, I had 5 sets at near 5RM loads. That being said, my best deadlift set of 5 was 495 and I capped off the block doing 495 for 3 sets of 5, so there had to be some strength increase in there somewhere. Using the SSB was a decision made after I lost a squat falling forward and knew I needed quads and low back strength, and wanted both together. Plus, I hated SSB, I sucked at it, which usually means you should do it. At the end of this block, it definitely sucked, but I can almost feel the increase in strength and density of my erectors, which is a satisfying feeling. Bench was bench, dealing with a pec strain (might have partially torn the tendon tbh - especially with this long of recovery) made me have to be careful and take what was there, but after rehab and this block, I felt more confident and safe using my pecs to bench again. The rest periods being timed forced me to be prepared and in the moment at all times, which helped me stay focused and ready to go. It also wildly increased my work capacity and ability to perform at less than optimal rest. After these 8 weeks of… fun… I opted for even more basic and old school; Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1, using my competition style lifts and not reducing to a training max percentage. Ballsy, I know.
This was… Interesting to put it simply. Most often with 5/3/1, you want to use a 90% training max, because it gets intense, but most times this is ran, it’s ran in multiple waves, I just wanted to do it once, and have fun, so I used my previous meet numbers as my maxes, knowing it was near maximal, but not completely. The hardest part was the AMRAPs on the last sets, not because they were heavy (I mean… kinda), but because mentally forcing yourself to keep going when it’s that intense is something else. The benefit to these AMRAPs every session was you could autoregulate based on how you felt. For example, week one bench, I did 270 for 6, but week two, I got 285 for 5. Then to finish it off, I managed 308 for 3, all of these at the time felt maximal and really hard, but only because I was taking what I felt I was capable of that day. Squat and bench both went very well, with bench just 7.5kg under my best triple to end it. Deadlifts were where things got interesting, and where a training max maybe should have been used. The intensity of the 3 weeks caught up quickly, and I’d been having grip issues the entirety of the block, so it was fairly disappointing. This all being said, it was a lot of fun, and I could see the benefit to doing training in this manner, I felt the density of the muscle training was great, and if I’d have ran this more than once through, using a training max and building up as I went, could have been a great option. But because I didn’t, the intensity is where things went wrong. But, I did get stronger, and I ran this in the deepest stage of my weight cut, finishing off the final week at 230lbs from 250.
All in all, my estimated total increased, at nearly 10kg lighter, so I’d call this “offseason” a success. But I think the most important thing that came from this training was finding the love for the process again. I’d been so concerned with totals and increasing my strength for so long, it was really nice to have a couple blocks that almost completely masked the top end and allowed me to focus on the now. Doing this, I remembered how much fun training can be, how fun it is to just feel like you’re getting stronger, and getting better without focusing on the total. If I wasn’t as competitive as I am, I’d consider stepping away from competing for a while and just having fun, doing different things, but for the time being, I’m still invested in blowing up the total, and this was just a convenient step in doing so, allowing me to have fun. Using what I’ve learned from this block, I hope to take this enjoyment into the next steps of prep and enjoying it all.
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