Conditioning and timing adjustments for Strength I

Hi Docs,

Right now I’m on week 4 of Strength I in preparation for my first meet and I’m really enjoying the progress on my lifts I’m seeing during the program so far (not such a fan of Friday Tempo Squats, but hey, not every workout is gonna be a home-run).

However, because I am bad at counting, I just realized that running the program as written will end up with the final day, Week 13 day 3, falling two weeks before the the scheduled meet. The obvious solution is to repeat a couple of the program’s weeks so the taper and peaking phase coincides with the run-up to the meet, and I’m wondering if there were any particular weeks you’d recommend doubling up on. I was thinking of either re-running week 4 again and/or potentially doing week 5 twice to not mess with fatigue or timing too much prior to the meet, but I’m certainly open to suggestions from the experts!

Also as a side-note, I know you guys talk about the importance of conditioning on the podcast a lot, but Strength 1 doesn’t really have a lot of that included, usually just 1 or 2 sessions of LISS per week and a single lonely HIIT session in week 4*, which doesn’t meet the recommended guidelines. With the 150-minute recommendation in mind, I’ve been doing around ~30 minutes of LISS after each of my workouts with a mild jog on Tuesdays. So far I haven’t felt run-down and the sRPE isn’t getting too intense (usually around 7 or so), so would I be fine to continue this for the immediate future? And if so, when would you recommend reducing the cardio load prior to the meet?

Thanks!

P.S. Although I really like the convenience of the app, one thing I like about the Excel spreadsheets is the rest time for different exercises. Is this something you could add to the app?

*I noticed that on weeks 5, 6, and 7 in the app, there is no cardio on the second GPP day but on the Excel spreadsheet there is HIIT prescribed – which is the “correct” programming? Also the in-app template notes for the GPP LISS in week 4 says, “20 sec spring every 2 min x 14 minutes,” which seems like a transcription error from the HIIT session.

Newton90,

Thanks for the post. In this situation, I’d repeat weeks 6 and 10 one time each to make up the gap. For the conditioning, the template hovers between ~200-350 MET-Minutes/wk of conditioning. This was done on purpose given that it’s an entry-level template and we expect people to otherwise be active outside of the gym. For reference, 30-min 3x/wk is ~ 450 MET-minutes. When combined with the jogging, you’re definitely meeting the guideline’s minimum of 500 MET-min per week. If you did the jog in addition to the template’s recommendation, you’d have met that also. All in all, I’m fine with your current conditioning schedule.

The Excel sheet always has the correct programming compared to the app. The errors there are harder to find than the Excel sheet, but we’re working through them.

-Jordan

Awesome, thanks for the recommendation and clarification on conditioning!

Hi Jordan,

Short followup post with a couple quick questions:

  1. I did something to tweak my left shoulder last week which has caused some minor pain/discomfort with bench press, but it generally feels a little better each day so whatever, who cares. However, when I try to do floor presses (as in W7D2), the pressure from the floor on my left rear delt and tricep causes pain and I lose a lot of tension in my arm at the bottom of the movement. While I haven’t dropped the bar on my face yet, I had a couple close calls before giving up and just doing wide-grip bench instead. For what it’s worth, regular close-grip bench doesn’t feel great, but at least I’m able to control the bar the whole time. If the shoulder is still giving me issues come W9 or W11 D2, should I do close-grip bench instead of floor press?

  2. Due to some unfortunate equipment arrangement, the only power rack’s safeties are stuck at their current height for kindergarteners to pin squat. My gym has combo racks with safeties, but I have heard from a friend that doing pin squats on combo racks is a faux pas. Wat do?