The lifter in question is a 40 yr old female out of LP for upper body, still in LP for lower body. B/c of work & kids, she has to train very early (5am-6am) and now with increasing volume, and particularly increasing the number of sets (due to BBM’s upper body plug-in, or same if she were to go to The Bridge), workouts are pushing out longer than an hour which is starting to affect her compliance rate. Deadlifts are starting to get missed more frequently due to running out of time. She has one lifting day on the weekend (Tue/Thurs/Sat or Sun) which is always fine due to having more time.
I’m trying to come up with program modifications that could work for increasing volume but working inside the hour requirement. Here are some ideas:
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Since the time is dominated by warmups/rest time, and therefore by number of sets, was thinking about shifting the sets for the weekdays to be fewer sets, higher reps. So instead of 4 sets of 5, for example, do 3 sets of 6 or 7. On weekends, do the lower-rep sets like 4 sets of 5. Possibly alternate weekly schedule so all comp lifts get a weekend day every other week.
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I believe I’ve seen it suggested here to shrink rest time to 3 minutes and adjust weight on the bar to maintain RPE
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Lower sets on weekdays, more on weekend (this seems like a suboptimal move towards more TM-type organization of using the weekend day as the primary stress driver)
What do you think of these and do you have other suggestions?
Thanks for all of the great information from BBM!