Something I’ve been seeing with my progress on strength 1 is that my 1 @8 is consistently going up week by week but not always my back off sets. I know I’m not over shooting my 1 @8 but my back off sets are around the same weight. For example my squat went like this for the past 3 weeks.
1@8 420
1@8 425
1@8 430 but my back off sets should be going up since I’m getting stronger but they are they same weight .Even though the calculator is saying I can go up I cannot without over shooting my RPE.
I wouldn’t view this as a problem.
If your top singles are increasing in weight while remaining the same relative effort, you are getting stronger. If you’re doing this without having to increase the load of your back-off sets, that’s even better because it means you’re still responding to that same stimulus. Lifting heavier weights on the back-off set isn’t necessarily better if you don’t need to be doing it to drive the single up, because it would otherwise just mean you’re incurring extra fatigue that you don’t actually need.
I recently got my 1RM high bar and low bar squats up to 600 lbs, without ever squatting a back-off set heavier than 435 lbs in many, many months. In other words, that was the level of stimulus I kept responding to with increases in top single performance, so I kept things there.
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Oh ok that makes sense, thanks Austin. That’s cool to hear man, save some strength for the rest of us haha. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say we aspire to be like you and Jordan. Thanks again.
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Congrats Austin. Did you either:
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Purposefully not increase the load on the back-off sets over 435 lbs? Or:
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You were unable to increase the load over 435 at the prescribed RPE?
I ask because I’ve assumed that we should try to increase loads on all sets, provided that we don’t overshoot the RPE?