Ive been running Strength 1 for 11 weeks now. The first 3 weeks I skipped the initial low stress week then experienced a minor back tweak during the 4th week of the program. Restarted the template from Week 1 and did fine. Somewhere around the 4th week again of this template I began experiencing back pain. Ever since then my back has felt pretty beat up most days of the week and my shoulders/elbows will ache sometimes. I was begging for the low stress week during the 7th week by the time it came around.
Most recently (tonight Week 8 Day 3 of my current run through) I warmed up to 370 for a deadlift single @8 and couldn’t even get it off of the floor. I normally shoot for a predicted single at rpe 6 and if that moves as expected I’ll send it for my single at 8 weight. Tonight I got a little lazy and hit 315 for a sub 6 single and sent it for 370. Mind you I’ve hit 370 for my top single 2 weeks prior to this and hit 335 for 5 at rpe 8 about 2 weeks ago. After failing 370 I took some weight off and tried to hit 345. I couldn’t get it more than a few inches off of the ground. I settled with 315 as my top single rather than keep failing attempts then threw on 295 for my first set of 4 which moved at less than the prescribed rpe. Did my 2 back off sets at 290 and the last set moved at an rpe 6. I want to note that during the deadlifts from day 1 I felt a pop in my lower back during my second work set so I lowered the rest of the rpe by 1 and finished the workout.
I’m a bit frustrated and don’t know what to do. With my past training I’ve found I flourish with slightly lower rpe work for my back off sets when it comes to the deadlift and squat. Mainly in the rpe 6 and below range. Whenever I start doing work at rpe 9 and then back off sets at 7s and 8s my e1rm doesn’t do nearly as well. Again, I’ve felt beat up and sore like an injury is going to come on for most of the time that I’ve been running this template but I’ve been satisfied with the progress I have made so Ive tried to keep my head down and run the course.
Do you have any suggestions on how I should continue forward? I don’t plan on competing in powerlifting so the deadlift doesn’t really mean much to me and has always been my worst lift but I would like to set some 1 rep maxes because I’ve never really done that before and wanted a solid bench mark to see where I’m at.
Thanks for the post and sorry to hear about your experience. I know that’s frustrating!
Sounds like there’s too much training stress being applied for your current fitness level and training tolerance. Whether this is due to volume, avg. intensity, proximity to failure, life stress, or a combination of all/any of these is unknown, but that’s the likely culprit. It’s not clear to me the severity of the back discomfort and if we should call it an injury or an annoyance, like DOMs or stiffness post-training. If you were otherwise fine and able to do everything you wanted to do without restriction from weeks 4 to now, that seems less likely to be an injury or too much training stress. If you regularly had to modify your training or activity to accommodate the discomfort, I’d feel more strongly about the training stress being a bit too high.
For the week 8, day 3 reported above, I would’ve done 315- 345- 370 for singles given that you were coming off of a deload week AND you apparently have had some back discomfort + noted “popping” experience. After 370 didn’t go, I would’ve NOT tried to do another single (little to no benefit in this context), but rather done the back off sets at a much lighter weight than I had planned on.
As far as what to do, it seems like you may be overshooting your deadlifts with respect to proximity to failure and the current training tolerance for deadlifting needs to go up as well. I think I would remove singles from your deadlift programming and lower the RPE by 1-2 points for the next ~6 weeks. After that, I think you should be in a good place to run a few blocks of training where singles are being trained and tested for deadlifts.