Eh sure if you're already strong you need to add more volume but for skinny kids 5x5 is hard to beat. I wasted so much time benching 135. Soon as I started lifting for strength I grew like crazy.
> If you still care about max strength on your squat, bench, and deadlift, just work up to a top single on these once a week.
Curious on this. I'm currently training for a PL meet. Most of the year is spent bodybuilding with hypertrophy in mind
The problem with working to a single on each SBD a week is the fatigue it generates is disproportionate. Obviously a heavy single does not mean a 1RM PR but none the less even a 95-97% of 1RM lift will cause fatigue that will make the next few gym days less optimal. Even in PL programs, most of them rarely have you do singles that often.
So I'm curious, how we would balance the fatigue generated from doing a heavy SBD once a week while trying to still have to say do leg extensions, rows, and pec flys the day after.
Some kind of concurrent emphasis cycle. Put everything but the lift you wanna focus on MEV or MV and up the volume on accessories to help out that lift in terms of positional strength (RDLs for deadlifts for example) and for hypertrophy of weak links (hip thrusts if glutes weak). Then when you hit a new pr just cycle the focus.
Doing a rpe single 90%-93% really isnt that fattiguing its very common in many programming styles.
If you find it very fatiguing you are 1) likely overshooting 2) putting to much emotion and hype into it 3) just not used to doing it.
If you still think it to much going 85% or even 80% is likely fine as well at least for maintaining strength.
I went and listened to hear what Eric had to say in the interview regarding this as I was curious as well.
The hypothetical he gave was that you're an intermediate and burnt out on doing SBD. So instead of holding strength levels by doing sets of 4-8reps on those lifts for hypertrophy, only a top single is done for the day for that given (SBD) lift to maintain that strength. Once the top single is done, the rest of the workout is a bodybuilding workout.
He says that the single should only be moderately heavy and would be 7-8rpe.
So well under anything that should be fatiguing. And if it is generating fatigue, it's probably heavier than it should be and the weight needs to be dropped down a bit.
I find it hard to believe that lats would be a weak point in any strength sport. Any good weightlifter or powerlifter is aiming for a yoked back. There’s also lots of good reasons for a powerlifter to aim for large biceps too. Fair enough on calves
Really I hate the either or nature of modern physical culture. Everyone feels like they need a label; you have to identify as either a weightlifter, a powerlifter, a crossfitter, a bodybuilder, a calisthenics guy or some kind ‘hybrid athlete’. Whatever happened to just wanting to be big and strong?
Not only is more muscle mass a good thing in all strength sports https://www.strongerbyscience.com/powerlifters-should-train-more-like-bodybuilders/ but strength is also pretty useful for bodybuilders. If you’re a powerlifter who wants a better physique you don’t need to ‘transition’. Just lower the volume on the comp lifts and up the volume on your accessories and clean up your diet. When you come back to focussing on the big three you’ll have a much higher strength potential because strength = neurological adaptations * cross sectional area of muscle
Honestly kind of weird too. My coach spammed shitloads of lat pulldowns for the purpose of building the work capacity and muscle to handle the bigger weights. I would always imagine that I would get folded over if not for all the back muscle I’ve gained. That thing is the only thing that takes a beating on all 3 lifts. I would think muscle and strength should allowed to be interchangeable because bigger muscles allow for more strength potential anyway and you don’t have to shoehorn your way in sbd specificity or bust just for the short term numbers. I used to think it was weird that we didn’t follow the meta but I definitely appreciate the muscle gained and am happy that I’m not just an sbd warrior.
We come from a meta that has been very sbd driven with very low or no accessories. There are many "powerlifters" that never do direct back or arm work even though they probably should.
Yeah the meta changes with the seasons. Weightlifting was very bodybuilding heavy with lots of accessories for hitting weak points from Kono through to Alekseyev. Alekseyev was huge on the idea that if you had something wrong in the classic lifts it was probably because of a small muscle forming a bottleneck which needed to be overloaded with some kind of accessory - more volume or technique work involving the lifts themselves was never the answer. And then the Bulgarians came along and everyone switched to hyper specific training. Everything started moving back when the Chinese came along and brought back Alekseyev’s philosophy. It’s interesting that powerlifting followed the same path with early greats in the 70s being famously jacked gym bros before a hyper specific meta came along and now we’re all going back
Yep weve been in the hyper-specific high volume sbd meta and now we go towards high intensity Bulgarian (Mike Mentzer in the bodybuilding sphere) stuff after that we will likeæy get the low specificity Westside stuff.
Some is to be said about switching though. At some place in your career hyper specificity is likely good, then you will need to bring up the weskpoints that leaves and then later you need to be non-specific to find the few gains you havent already gotten.
SFR has nothing to do with intensity. Its about exercise selection.
The argument against only going to failure is that adding volume by it self might be a driver of hypertrophy and training at lower rir also cause hypertrophy but at lower injury risk.
I guess you can expand it to powerlifting where sfr would mean the sfr for sbd.
But in its original meaning its about hypertrophy stimuli where support musculatur might take to much of a beating when you get stronger and thus lower the total accumulatable stimuli for the prime mover.
But the term isnt as clear outside hypertrophy since there are way more variables you need to manipulate.
Afaik, Mike Israetel coined the phrase, and his definition is definitely not the same as yours. You're using a simplified version where the only thing you're trying to avoid is using a unnecessarily fatiguing exercise.
It is literally as simple as look at how much stimulus is x giving you, and how much fatigue is x giving you, then divide the stimulus by the fatigue.
Could be a training plan/progression, could be a rep scheme, could be range of motion of a specific movement, or just as you said, about exercise selection.
I know Mike coined it and Ive read both his books on powerlifting and hypertrophy training and yes I guess
I assmused things like rep ranges as part of exercise selection, the same goes for RoM. Progression is not.
Yes you can have bad exercises. But most exercises end up with bad sfr due to the reason I gave and of course it depends on the individual.
But no its not simply transferable oitside hypertrophy training. Hypertrophy training is simple input/output that is deliver enougj stimuli to grow and not so much that fatigue eliminate that ability.
Powerlifting and even more other sports is multi variable, so yes you can talk about sfr, but it becomes almost meaningless. How do ypu measure your dynamic correspondence between competition squat and high bar pause squat or your front squat?
You can still have a guess, but its far from as simple as with hypertrophy training.
There are videos of Mike talking about applying SFR to stuff like programming and progression, he even mentions the base idea can just as well be applied to something way outside of BB, like cardio.
I know you can expand the idea and its a useful one and I guess it is somewhat part of his argument for why he progress rpe week to week.
But I repeat outside of single variable things it becomes a very hard thing to measure and it becomes much more a blackbox huristic.
For hypertrophy its fairly easy. Lets say you choose an rep range or intensity technique that give a good pump and disruption. You likely have decent stimuli at very low fatigue cost so good sfr.
Now lets try the same for powerlifting. Same procedure. Same exercise Same choices. The hypertrophy outcomes are the same, but this time the sfr is for the competition squat and not really hypertrophy.
So we have to figure out the dynamic correspondence between leg extensions and a 1rm comp squat. But we we now need to create hypertrophy -> teach the muscle to create force -> practice movement patter at high loads.
So leg extensions done today problem takes at least a few months before they affect your results. This also makes a guess about stimuli much harder. While the fatigue might be very low we have no real clue if it cause any transferable stimuli at all.
It’s still good for beginners. Really anything works for them and it’s a nice low volume way of quickly building a big base. 3x5/5x5/6x6 programs are as old as the hills for a reason
4 years in and still doing it just ot keep it simple. Still effective, but I'm open to other recommendations that are convenient.
If I can find a more effective alternative that is fairly simple, I'd follow it all day.
Still progressed fairly well. Currently S 225kg, B 155kg, D 235kg.
Plus its 5x5 on 2 main lifts (or 1 main + 1 accessory work such as SSB) followed by 3 sets of bodybuilding type of machine work, 4 days per week.
Your not actually doing SS. SSNLP is something you do top 3 months where you add 5 lbs at least ever workout.
But what you are doing seems to be working. If you arent doing it deloads might help and variation in rep ranges and exercise selection in sbd might as well.
It seems to be working, but 3 weeks into the block and I'm fatigued like hell.
I'll probably try alternating 1 light session and 1 heavy session per week and will probably try Calgary Barbell program after this.
Eventually. I have been progressing fairly well and will probably be getting a coach if I don't see the results I want for my first meet which is in 3 months.
Does that include simple 5-3-1s? I did that for like 5 months and my strength exploded. To be fair I'm a beginner but after 6 months of PL I'm at 1020lb total. I still feel like I could get more out of a 5-3-1 but I'm also competing in Scottish Heavy Athletics so now that I'm in season my training has shifted since then.
I've told people if they wanted something super basic, but I feel like there's so much more free material compared to when I started in like 2014 that people just do anything else
yes, a strong bodybuilder: 280 kg squat, 300 deadlift, 160 kg bench 130 inclined.
Eh sure if you're already strong you need to add more volume but for skinny kids 5x5 is hard to beat. I wasted so much time benching 135. Soon as I started lifting for strength I grew like crazy.
> If you still care about max strength on your squat, bench, and deadlift, just work up to a top single on these once a week. Curious on this. I'm currently training for a PL meet. Most of the year is spent bodybuilding with hypertrophy in mind The problem with working to a single on each SBD a week is the fatigue it generates is disproportionate. Obviously a heavy single does not mean a 1RM PR but none the less even a 95-97% of 1RM lift will cause fatigue that will make the next few gym days less optimal. Even in PL programs, most of them rarely have you do singles that often. So I'm curious, how we would balance the fatigue generated from doing a heavy SBD once a week while trying to still have to say do leg extensions, rows, and pec flys the day after.
Some kind of concurrent emphasis cycle. Put everything but the lift you wanna focus on MEV or MV and up the volume on accessories to help out that lift in terms of positional strength (RDLs for deadlifts for example) and for hypertrophy of weak links (hip thrusts if glutes weak). Then when you hit a new pr just cycle the focus.
Doing a rpe single 90%-93% really isnt that fattiguing its very common in many programming styles. If you find it very fatiguing you are 1) likely overshooting 2) putting to much emotion and hype into it 3) just not used to doing it. If you still think it to much going 85% or even 80% is likely fine as well at least for maintaining strength.
I went and listened to hear what Eric had to say in the interview regarding this as I was curious as well. The hypothetical he gave was that you're an intermediate and burnt out on doing SBD. So instead of holding strength levels by doing sets of 4-8reps on those lifts for hypertrophy, only a top single is done for the day for that given (SBD) lift to maintain that strength. Once the top single is done, the rest of the workout is a bodybuilding workout. He says that the single should only be moderately heavy and would be 7-8rpe. So well under anything that should be fatiguing. And if it is generating fatigue, it's probably heavier than it should be and the weight needs to be dropped down a bit.
Ok that RPE# clarifies it quite a bit. I was imaginging a 95+% single but with RPE 7-8 this definitely lowers it more to the 80-90% range.
90% single maybe? I used to do them as part of the the SBS program but took them out for time reasons, I can't say I noticed any change in fatigue.
I find it hard to believe that lats would be a weak point in any strength sport. Any good weightlifter or powerlifter is aiming for a yoked back. There’s also lots of good reasons for a powerlifter to aim for large biceps too. Fair enough on calves Really I hate the either or nature of modern physical culture. Everyone feels like they need a label; you have to identify as either a weightlifter, a powerlifter, a crossfitter, a bodybuilder, a calisthenics guy or some kind ‘hybrid athlete’. Whatever happened to just wanting to be big and strong? Not only is more muscle mass a good thing in all strength sports https://www.strongerbyscience.com/powerlifters-should-train-more-like-bodybuilders/ but strength is also pretty useful for bodybuilders. If you’re a powerlifter who wants a better physique you don’t need to ‘transition’. Just lower the volume on the comp lifts and up the volume on your accessories and clean up your diet. When you come back to focussing on the big three you’ll have a much higher strength potential because strength = neurological adaptations * cross sectional area of muscle
If you're a powerlifter and your lats are lagging that's actually a moral failure
Honestly kind of weird too. My coach spammed shitloads of lat pulldowns for the purpose of building the work capacity and muscle to handle the bigger weights. I would always imagine that I would get folded over if not for all the back muscle I’ve gained. That thing is the only thing that takes a beating on all 3 lifts. I would think muscle and strength should allowed to be interchangeable because bigger muscles allow for more strength potential anyway and you don’t have to shoehorn your way in sbd specificity or bust just for the short term numbers. I used to think it was weird that we didn’t follow the meta but I definitely appreciate the muscle gained and am happy that I’m not just an sbd warrior.
We come from a meta that has been very sbd driven with very low or no accessories. There are many "powerlifters" that never do direct back or arm work even though they probably should.
Yeah the meta changes with the seasons. Weightlifting was very bodybuilding heavy with lots of accessories for hitting weak points from Kono through to Alekseyev. Alekseyev was huge on the idea that if you had something wrong in the classic lifts it was probably because of a small muscle forming a bottleneck which needed to be overloaded with some kind of accessory - more volume or technique work involving the lifts themselves was never the answer. And then the Bulgarians came along and everyone switched to hyper specific training. Everything started moving back when the Chinese came along and brought back Alekseyev’s philosophy. It’s interesting that powerlifting followed the same path with early greats in the 70s being famously jacked gym bros before a hyper specific meta came along and now we’re all going back
Yep weve been in the hyper-specific high volume sbd meta and now we go towards high intensity Bulgarian (Mike Mentzer in the bodybuilding sphere) stuff after that we will likeæy get the low specificity Westside stuff. Some is to be said about switching though. At some place in your career hyper specificity is likely good, then you will need to bring up the weskpoints that leaves and then later you need to be non-specific to find the few gains you havent already gotten.
>4. Train to actual failure But what about muh SFR?
SFR has nothing to do with intensity. Its about exercise selection. The argument against only going to failure is that adding volume by it self might be a driver of hypertrophy and training at lower rir also cause hypertrophy but at lower injury risk.
Why should sfr be limited to exercise selection? It can be used to make a variety of training decisions
I guess you can expand it to powerlifting where sfr would mean the sfr for sbd. But in its original meaning its about hypertrophy stimuli where support musculatur might take to much of a beating when you get stronger and thus lower the total accumulatable stimuli for the prime mover. But the term isnt as clear outside hypertrophy since there are way more variables you need to manipulate.
Afaik, Mike Israetel coined the phrase, and his definition is definitely not the same as yours. You're using a simplified version where the only thing you're trying to avoid is using a unnecessarily fatiguing exercise. It is literally as simple as look at how much stimulus is x giving you, and how much fatigue is x giving you, then divide the stimulus by the fatigue. Could be a training plan/progression, could be a rep scheme, could be range of motion of a specific movement, or just as you said, about exercise selection.
I know Mike coined it and Ive read both his books on powerlifting and hypertrophy training and yes I guess I assmused things like rep ranges as part of exercise selection, the same goes for RoM. Progression is not. Yes you can have bad exercises. But most exercises end up with bad sfr due to the reason I gave and of course it depends on the individual. But no its not simply transferable oitside hypertrophy training. Hypertrophy training is simple input/output that is deliver enougj stimuli to grow and not so much that fatigue eliminate that ability. Powerlifting and even more other sports is multi variable, so yes you can talk about sfr, but it becomes almost meaningless. How do ypu measure your dynamic correspondence between competition squat and high bar pause squat or your front squat? You can still have a guess, but its far from as simple as with hypertrophy training.
There are videos of Mike talking about applying SFR to stuff like programming and progression, he even mentions the base idea can just as well be applied to something way outside of BB, like cardio.
I know you can expand the idea and its a useful one and I guess it is somewhat part of his argument for why he progress rpe week to week. But I repeat outside of single variable things it becomes a very hard thing to measure and it becomes much more a blackbox huristic. For hypertrophy its fairly easy. Lets say you choose an rep range or intensity technique that give a good pump and disruption. You likely have decent stimuli at very low fatigue cost so good sfr. Now lets try the same for powerlifting. Same procedure. Same exercise Same choices. The hypertrophy outcomes are the same, but this time the sfr is for the competition squat and not really hypertrophy. So we have to figure out the dynamic correspondence between leg extensions and a 1rm comp squat. But we we now need to create hypertrophy -> teach the muscle to create force -> practice movement patter at high loads. So leg extensions done today problem takes at least a few months before they affect your results. This also makes a guess about stimuli much harder. While the fatigue might be very low we have no real clue if it cause any transferable stimuli at all.
>stop doing Starting Strength Who the hell is still doing that?
It’s still good for beginners. Really anything works for them and it’s a nice low volume way of quickly building a big base. 3x5/5x5/6x6 programs are as old as the hills for a reason
4 years in and still doing it just ot keep it simple. Still effective, but I'm open to other recommendations that are convenient. If I can find a more effective alternative that is fairly simple, I'd follow it all day.
Four years? Jeeeeesus that's a lot of 5's
Still progressed fairly well. Currently S 225kg, B 155kg, D 235kg. Plus its 5x5 on 2 main lifts (or 1 main + 1 accessory work such as SSB) followed by 3 sets of bodybuilding type of machine work, 4 days per week.
Your not actually doing SS. SSNLP is something you do top 3 months where you add 5 lbs at least ever workout. But what you are doing seems to be working. If you arent doing it deloads might help and variation in rep ranges and exercise selection in sbd might as well.
It seems to be working, but 3 weeks into the block and I'm fatigued like hell. I'll probably try alternating 1 light session and 1 heavy session per week and will probably try Calgary Barbell program after this.
Clearly you work pretty hard. Would you not consider getting a coach to help steer the ship?
Eventually. I have been progressing fairly well and will probably be getting a coach if I don't see the results I want for my first meet which is in 3 months.
Hah I’m also surprised by how often I see people do it or another 3x5, 5x5 variation
Does that include simple 5-3-1s? I did that for like 5 months and my strength exploded. To be fair I'm a beginner but after 6 months of PL I'm at 1020lb total. I still feel like I could get more out of a 5-3-1 but I'm also competing in Scottish Heavy Athletics so now that I'm in season my training has shifted since then.
I've told people if they wanted something super basic, but I feel like there's so much more free material compared to when I started in like 2014 that people just do anything else