My apologies in advance… I’m sure this has been asked previously.
I’m interested in programming for five consecutive days M-F. These will be done during my lunch break at work, as my facility has a small gym but is well set up for Powerlifting and General Strength Training.
If doing full body or lower body sessions I would have approximately 40-45 minutes. If doing Upper Body I could add another five+ minutes to that. If needed I could fill in a little gap/pulling accessory work right after work later in the day.
Relevant information about me: 50 year old, three powerlifting meets done over the last year. Intermediate lifter overall.
I have been looking at either adjusting one of your four day templates and spreading out the work over five days or doing the same thing with classic heavy/light programming. However, are there options on any BBM templates for strength that allow you to select five days specifically?
To organize your thoughts around programming training variables, I think it’s best to ‘solve’ for maximizing training load, where training load is the nature and the amount of training someone does. In this paradigm, if decision A gets you more training load compared to decision B, I’d favor decision A. And if there’s little difference between two decisions re: training load, it’s then mostly personal preference.
When it comes to training frequency, I view it as mostly an instrument to distribute training load across the week. Take a given program with 30 working sets per week. You could do 10 sets on 3 days, 5 sets of 6 days, 6 sets on 5 days, or 8-15-7 and get the same results. Yes, there may be some difference regarding in-the-gym performance, but I’m not convinced relatively small changes in performance translate to different adaptations.
Tl;dr- you could take your existing program and split it up into 5 days per week.
Moving on to the training split, the organization of your current program, this also falls under the maximizing training load heuristic. On the one hand, full body training tends to spread the fatigue for any single movement (and their related muscle groups) over the week, thereby potentially increasing training load due to more of the work being done in a fresh(er) state. On the other hand, upper-lower splits tend to require less time setting up equipment, warming up, and so on, thereby potentially increasing training load via volume. So, this is again mostly personal preference, with a bit of trial and error built on top of it.
Tl;dr- Choose a split you like that allows you do the most amount of high-quality training.
For this setup, I’d recommend one of the following:
Splitting up one of the 4-day templates, probably something like Powerbuilding 1 or Strength 1 if I had to pick (assuming there’s another meet coming up), into 5-days based on your preferences is also an option.