Hi!
I have a couple of questions about where I should take my training. I suppose you need to know my overall situation and current goals to answer some of my questions, so I’ll start by outlining those.
Background: First of all, strength in the powerlifting movements has always been my main focus in terms of strength training, although hypertrophy is also important. Pretty much a 60-40 split between the two, in terms of priority. I used to want to try entering a powerlifting competition at some point, and kind of still do but it’s not a priority right now.
I’m 24 years old, male, 104 kg, 189 cm.
To put it simply, my training has been going downhill pretty much since the start of the pandemic. By that I mean my motivation to train has been going down the drain and my habits in terms of consistent training and eating a diet that facilitates good results from said training have been slowly falling apart. Gyms being repeatedly shut down, thus repeatedly setting back my training and making me unable to trust that my training won’t be interrupted at a few days’ notice was quite demoralizing. There have also been other mental health issues going on, both covid-related and not, which were slowly chipping away at my excitement about training. I did lift my all time PR:s somewhere around November 2021 though. This was at the end of longest period of time during the past 2-ish years where my training was going reasonably well - there were no lockdowns for a while, and I was still in the habit of using training as a way to cope with mental health issues. I managed to run the PBII and PLII templates back-to-back in that order, mostly uninterrupted until I started a new job and had some pretty severe sleep-related issues due to that, which is probably a big part of why why my lifts completely stalled for the last 6-4 weeks of the template. Nevertheless, I squatted 162,5 kg, Benched 95kg and deadlifted 182,5kg at the end of PLII. This was about a 10 kg increase in every lift from what I had lifted pre-covid, so there’s plenty to be happy about there. I didn’t see it that way at the time though, and being unhappy with my lifts stalling and also having decided to lose some weight, I decided to change gears and do Hypertrophy II. I thought of this as a way to develop a broader base of physical fitness, before turning back to.
It’s in late 2021 that things got really bad. I was incredibly busy at the time, and this is when I started to develop pattern of postponing my training sessions to the point where it was often taking me 2 actual weeks to perform a single “week” of training. There was also another lockdown from late December 2021 to early January 2022, which didn’t end up lasting very long but was extremely demoralizing, as I had thought there wouldn’t be another one. Things remained pretty bad for the entirety of 2022. I was still really busy, working a part-time job while doing my master’s in History. I got covid in february, which was surprisingly severe despite of me being young, healthy, fully vaccinated and boosted. When I got back, some chronic back pain I’ve had at varying levels of severity (barely noticeable most of the time) for a very long time ended up getting bad enough to interfere with training, so I had to stop what I had been doing training-wise to do the lower-back pain template. Despite this template run being very patchy due to time and motivation issues, I got the pain back under control such that it’s much less severe and always alleviated by training and physical activity in general.
After more than a year of patchy training, my numbers regressing by 10-20 kg compared to my PR:s in all of my lifts and not actually managing to run a single template from start to finish, I have finally realized that I have been overreaching in terms of my template choices. 4 “main lifting days” per week is just not realistic for me right now. In fact, after such a long time of inconsistent training, 4x/week templates actually seem to be too much training stress for me as well, as I have been feeling overly beat up by my training sessions whenever I have been able to perform a training week as scheduled. I have thus realized I need to choose a 3x/week template.
My current situation: I started the General S&C template last week, and was able to perform the first week within the actual week I started. Turns out, training 5 days a week (including GPP sessions) rather than 6 gives me some much needed room to move around sessions while still being able to perform the “training week” within a week. This seems to be an important line for me, in terms of being able to feel like training is going well. I did also consider the time crunch template, but decided not to go for that because I’m not that time crunched. I’ve also been demotivated from powerbuilding-style training, which is mostly what I’ve been trying to do for the past year or so, and I feel like Strength I or similar would still be too time consuming. I am considering doing that in the summer, as I will have more time then.
My current training goals:
- To train consistently
- To make at least some strength progress
- To lose some weight. Despite trying to lose weight since late 2021, my weight has been trending upwards. I’ll cut 10 kg’s over 20 weeks and then see where my waist circumference is at to see if I need to continue.
My questions
- is the G S&C template a reasonable choice, given what I’ve told you? I’ll be happy to provide more information if needed, although I suspect it’s more likely I’ve given too much
- Despite wanting variety right now, I was thinking of choosing the powerlifting comp movements as the main movements for block 2. Is this a reasonable choice, given I want to ease myself back into powerlifting eventually?
- The EMOM sets exclusively list percentages for weight selection. Are the sets of 5@8 from the low stress weeks supposed to be used to estimate the percentages?
- Is the aforementioned weight loss goal reasonable?
Sorry for the long post. Thanks for taking the time to read it, and if you didn’t, I completely understand