As a senior in college (last year) I ran the 12W strength program and had great success. I followed it up with the 4-day hypertrophy program and started up my second run through 12W strength immediately following the completion of 4-day hypertrophy. On week 9, I injured my left knee. This was around the same time I went from an intern at a boutique investment bank to working full-time post-graduation. I posted on the Pain & Rehab forum and came away with the idea that I had patellar tendinopathy. I purchased and went through the knee rehab template and the pain slowly decreased until it was gone around week 11.
I then went back on 12W strength and modified it to a three-day program (removed the last exercise on week three and the last two on week 4) that I performed over a four-day schedule as I have ~1hr to train during my two week days dedicated to the gym. I was gaining strength quickly and hit a 455 squat pr on Sunday of week 12. On Tuesday of week 13, I felt something go in my back while lifting a 1 @ 8 (435). I managed to finish the rep, but tying my shoes and sleeping became arduous tasks.
The pain has shifted to my left glute and wakes me up roughly once per night. The pain isn’t sharp, just a constant dull ache that grows in intensity while I sleep. For the past three weeks post-injury, I’ve been running the knee rehab template with slight modifications (i.e. full speed squats are fine). I plan to continue increasing the weight on the bar until the pain fully subsides - which will hopefully be soon.
Question: It seems I’m doing something wrong - whether it’s incorrectly modifying 12W strength to fit my schedule or doing to much volume given my new schedule - so what would you recommend I do in terms of programming? Stick to what I’ve been running and hope the previous cycles have been abnormalities? Shift to something with less volume like Strength I? Thanks so much!
Sorry to hear about your rough go of it lately. A few things off the top of my head:
The videos are private here so I can’t see them to comment on if your form is contributory, though it likely isn’t.
Sounds like you’re having some periods of high stress with the internship, for example. It might be that you need to reduce RPE targets by 1-2 during periods of higher life stress, especially if coming back from an injury when you’re detrained a bit for tolerating heavy loads.
I’m not sure what to make of the back tweak- it doesn’t sound like anything specific given that you were a) able to complete the rep, b) able to squat at full speed now, and c) do not have reported motor deficits. I think that this may just be a stretch of bad luck, but if it were me going forward- I might aim for a more gradual/conservative exposure to PRs if/when they crop up to build tolerance to higher intensity work. That said, I’m not sure that’s warranted since I’d like to know more about you before commenting further.
I think some of this is likely consult territory for what to do moving forward specific to this entire history, but if it were me I’d probably just run the last few weeks of the rehab template right back into the 12WS and autoregulate the loads during periods of high life stress.
Thanks so much @Jordan_Feigenbaum , I changed the videos to public and updated the links in case you have time to review quickly.
A mixture of stress/detraining seems to be the culprit after reading your response. It’s quite difficult to delineate fatigue from throwing in the towel too early, so I have adopted a just keep putting in the work mentality. I’ll run through 12WS after this and hopefully realize some of the PRs I’ve been working towards
Thank you both for being so generous with your time. I’ll also look into a consult if things don’t go according to plan.
Yea neither of those videos show anything that’s clearly injury-inducing. I think you likely went a bit deeper on the 435 and then felt a shift on the way up, though no physical damage actually happened.
