6 Weeks for Meet Prep - Template Choice Advice needed

Dear BBM coaches,

After finishing the 8-week HLM template, I will have 6 weeks left for my first-ever meet prep. Do you think it’s a good idea to pick a 3-week template to run it twice, or pick 2 of these templates (for instance, Novice + Advanced Fast)? Or should I somehow pick and plug 6 weeks from the 12-week Strength template?

Since there is a peaking component at the end of HLM, do I need a pivot low-stress week after it to prep for the meet?

Many thanks in advance for your precious advice!!

This is a bit tricky given how much time you have left before your meet.

We don’t have any information here about how you responded to the HLM template – if you responded well to that, I’d probably just run that again (without any low stress week now) leading into your meet. If you wanted to try one of the peaking templates you could tack that on for the last 2 weeks.

My 7-week progress on HLM v1 is a total increase 43 lbs in E1RM: Squat 9 lbs, Bench 10 lbs and DL 24 lbs. For comparison, my progress on 3-day Hypertrophy is 100 lbs:Squat 42 lbs, Bench 19 lbs, and DL 39 lbs.

Not sure if “not responding well to HLM” is the correct answer here, but assuming it is, would I benefit from doing Bridget 3.0 for Week 2-4, and then add a novice peaking template for the last 3 weeks (week 3 being the meet week)?

Yeah, it’s tough for us to still know if you didn’t respond well to the HLM as that could still be very reasonable training progress after pretty robust progress on the 3DH. But yes, you can do those weeks of the Bridge and the peaking template!

Thank you both, Leah and Austin! I think it’s a good time to plug in what’s been said on the latest live Q&A: “it’s just a meet. Don’t overthink it. Just do it. Or don’t.” :smile: