20% reduction from 1@8 for C-S+C-D?

Training Q&A [Moderated]
1

Hello BB Medicine Crew,

I’d like to start out by thanking you guys for providing The Bridge eBook free of charge. I have made excellent progress so far and have never achieved this level of strength through my 2+ years of cycling on and off LP.

My question concerns the prescribed back-off sets for the competition squat and deadlift for the first half of the 12-Week Press Template. Given that there is a minimum intensity threshold (appprox RPE 7) that has direct carryover to the expression of 1RM strength (what we’re training for), why is the prescribed reduction so large?

5 reps at RPE 7 corresponds to roughly a 14% reduction from a single at 8. Now, fatigue management may play a role, but I wonder then why the prescribed reduction stays unchanged throughout the first half of the program.

Any clarification would be much appreciated!

Nathan

2

There is no minimum RPE for strength development, though we’d generally like to stay in the 70-80% range for most volume work. -20% squarely puts someone at 70-73% 1RM.

3

When I ran the bridge, I didnt have the greatest results. I would have my first set at the prescribed RPE, but was getting a lot of creep in the later sets. Looking back I feel my poor progress was a result of over shooting the RPE. I’m now doing the 12 week strength template and went in with fairly conservative numbers, as recommended. I am just killing it with this program. I was losing faith that I could add 5 pounds every week, but have added more than that a few times without a change from the previous weeks RPE. The program is working better than I ever expected. I’m greatly looking forward to the second half of the program.

4

Thank you for the reply, Dr. Feigenbaum. A set of 5 performed at 72% of 1RM would correspond to an RPE of approximately 5 (if we can even assess that low) correct? While you and Dr. Baraki have stated many times that loads in excess of 70% 1RM contribute better to strength acquisition, you have also said that a trainee should only keep track of work at or above RPE 7. Might the prescribed intensity for the back off sets be too low for ideally developing strength? The Bridge seemed to prioritize RPE 8/9 work and this seems like a departure.

Thank you for engaging with all of your followers so quickly through this and other forums!

I don’t think you can rate an RPE of 5 and I think historically I have said that folks should track sets @ 7 and higher, but I would take a more moderate stance on that now. I do not think that 70-73% of an accurate 1RM with the pre fatigue of a 1 @ 8 is too low to develop strength. Rather, this is my preferred range for many.

The Bridge is a different program than the 12WS with multiple different variables such as total volume, training frequency, exercise variations, etc. They are also aimed at different folks

5

FWIW, I have a slightly different theory. I think if you follow the 12-week strength prescriptions as outlined in this thread, your last set will be about @ 8. It seems to me that you lose 1-2% of 1RM per set due to fatigue.

Jordan has said many times he believes that you can do sets across @ 8, and if I was you, I’d listen to him over me. It just fits better with my experience to think of the prescription being X sets of 5, with the final set being @ 8, with 1-2% of fatigue per set. This gives you the percentages from the template.

6

Thank you for the reply. I won’t beat a dead horse, as this is your training plan and you have a breadth of coaching and personal experience prescribing correct intensity.

My parting question is this: in so far as a person’s end goal is to become as strong as possible in the competition lifts, generally intensities that approximate the test (be they in close accessories or the lifts themselves) have greater specificity, correct?

Yes, but that is not terribly meaningful from a program management standpoint and additionally, the context “become as strong as possible in the competition lifts” is not specific enough of a context to know exactly what you mean. Strength is not merely “the production of force against an external resistance”- that’s rhetoric.

If you mean get strong as displayed by the best attempt in a meet then you should regularly practice singles for a good amount of training, in general.

If you mean get strong as displayed by a 3 or 5RM then practicing heavy 3’s and 5’s will be the best prep for that (not singles). Getting better at heavy 3’s and 5’s may also carry over to displaying a max single in less trained folks or when large differences in performance have taken place, e.g. a 3RM going from 300 to 500. An "improvement’ in a 5RM of 315 to 320 tells me precisely nothing about anything pertaining to strength performance or development processes.

A more germane point about this whole discussion is that strength development =/= strength performance outside of programs that rely on an improved performance to provide the developmental strength, e.g. NLP and TM.

In NLP for instance, each workout is a display of performance on that day, which is used as both an indicator of efficacy (from the previous day’s performance) and as the stress for the next workout. This stops being effective about a week or two before NLP ceases to work because the performance is no longer developing any more strength secondary to the lifter getting acclimated to the stressors of the program, suboptimal average intensity of the program, and other suboptimal program design variables. The next few workouts are “successful” as previous training’s stressors are “realized” for about a week.

At this point, the lifter is in quite a pickle. The previous training did not set them up for long term success due to the hyperspecificity, lack of conditioning, lack of work capacity development, and self efficacy development (like using RPE) while ALSO washing out any residual training stress that could’ve been applied to future programming. It’s like starting over at square one, which is what the novice program was designed to address in the first place…

In any event, the real lesson here is that strength development does not require exclusive adherence to ultra-specific intensity ranges, but rather it takes place over a larger range, i.e. average intensities in the 70-80% range with frequent exposure to higher intensities at much lower volumes.

5 Likes
7

Tangentially related… but I’m doing the 12 Week Strength program, and after reading the posts here I eyeballed the Press template more closely. I’m noticing that the peaking/sports form block is quite a bit different - there is a lot more volume at an overall lower intensity for squats and deadlifts. Do you see any problem in using the peaking strategy found in the press template, rather than the strength template for the competition lifts? I am assuming the press template reflects your more recent and current programming approaches as it is the newer template.

I’m very happy to just continue and do the program as is and learn how my body responds to it, and I realise both are just general templates, not individualised so it’ll be hard to say which would be better for me. The only reason I’m even looking at this other peaking block is because of how I went during Week 8 of the program, but that could be due to many different factors which will correct itself during Week 9 anyway.

8

We recommend doing the programs as written, of course, and adjusting things based on your response. So if you find that you do better with a different peaking strategy, that’s a good thing to know!

1 Like
9

I want to make sure that I am understanding this if that is ok.

When it comes to the 12 Week Strength Program we accumulate stress at a lower intensity to control fatigue while still promoting hypertrophy and increasing neuromuscular efficiency with heavy singles. We don’t need to go close to failure each set because the total volume is high and volume is the primary driver of hypertrophy. In contrast the 7 week hypertrophy template uses relatively higher intensities and higher RPEs. The potentially higher amount of fatigue derived from higher RPE work in the hypertrophy program is a necessary part of training due to the RBE and eventual desensitization of low intensity work. We need to expose the lifter to a novel stress, which in this case also promotes hypertrophy, to resensitize them to lower intensity training.

Am I on the right track here? To be honest I’m still trying to get my head around the idea of not having to use high RPE sets to promote hypertrophy. Thanks for all of the content you guys!