Deadlift reps getting slower

[Joshuawholifts]

Hello fellow forum members,

I was wondering if any of you have had a similar experience and if so, how you addressed it.

I was running the 3-day GPP/Hypertrophy template, and then went from that into the Bridge 3.0. I am currently on Week 3 of B3.0

Over the past 6 weeks or so, my deadlift has really seemed to struggle. I have tried judiciously to select the loads appropriately for the RPE, but if feels like I have been steadily declining, especially the last 4 weeks or so. In particular, it seems like my reps have gotten much slower. I have been having occasional hip pain too, during the movement, as I am reaching lock-out. Towards the end of my unnecessarily prolonged frankenstein LP run about a year ago, I had pulled 455 for a double, and had been routinely doing 405-415 for a single set of 5. In the last 6 months, I have had difficulty pulling 405 for a single. And last Saturday, on training day 3 for B3.0, I did 365 for 8, but it *felt* very difficult and was very slow. It has all been a bit discouraging, and I am trying to keep the right perspective. But I welcome any input.

[ropable]

I haven't had that experience with deadlift, but: before the first time I ran the 12 week strength template, my max-effort bench press was 105 kg. After I ran it, my max-effort bench press was....100 kg. Squat and deadlift went up nicely, but BP went nowhere. In hindsight, I think that my main issue was poor technique and I have subsequently seen a decent improvement in BP on the same program.

The moral of the story is: training is sometimes weird and progress can be nonlinear. Also remember that neither the Hypertrophy and Bridge 3.0 templates are intended as pure strength training programs, so it may be reasonable for your 1RM to drop off a bit at present.

[DylanKittrellCPT]

Sounds like you are having some programming difficulties. Are you tracking your training? It's not totally clear what your training history looks like and a training log would be helpful in order to give any sort of plausible retrospective analysis of what might have happened. You said you have struggled pulling 405x1 in the past six month but you were also running the hypertrophy template, in which I don't recall there being any singles. In any case, a training log isn't necessary to know that if your lifts are struggling either 1) the formulation of the programming is not appropriate for you, 2) the dose is not enough. Without knowing more about your training history, I can't say confidently which it is.

Someone said above that progress is non-linear and dips in performance are expected. While true, 6 months is too long of a dip in performance to not have some sort of plausible explanation.

[ionRod]

I have the latest 3-Day GPP/Hypertrophy and it has singles starting from Week 4

[Joshuawholifts]

I appreciate the input. After listening to a couple of the more recent podcasts/Q&As from BBM, I have re-evaluated my previous 6 months of training history. I also, through witnessing the experience of my brother who also trains in a similar way and had a very acutely stressful week, helped me realize that leading up to my most recent frustrating training episode, I had been experiencing a steady increase in the allostatic (job related) stress of my life, but it had happened relatively gradually over a period of 4 weeks and kept getting worse, and this was impacting my training more than I realized.

Much of that settled down the end of last week and my training sessions since have been markedly better, and my own subjective experience much more chill.

[DylanKittrellCPT]

That can make a difference!