Help me pick a template

Couple of programming questions…

I just recently discovered Barbell Medicine after burning myself out on one of the 4 day split routines in Practical Programming for Strength Training. I essentially deloaded for a few weeks and during that time discovered the routine you guys highlighted here: General Strength Training Template for the Intermediate/Advanced

I’ve been running the program for a few weeks and am loving the RPE approach and the increased variety versus just grinding out endless sets of 5. The squat variations alone made me feel like a new man.

My questions are…

  1. Where do I go from here? Obviously this is just a short free program that you guys published in a blog post – curious which of your templates would be a good followup for someone primarily interested in general strength development.
  2. The workouts in the above program seem to be quite long. Is there any way to gauge how long the workout sessions might last in any of your programs? Or could some of them be more easily modified (like adding days) to decrease session length?
1 Like

Heasle,

Glad you had some good results on that program. For your questions:

  1. Depends what you want to do. Probably the most closely related program for strength would be Powerlifting II.
  2. I think that shortening rest periods to 4-5 min on your 1st exercise of the day and 2-3 min on your 2nd and 3rd exercises should keep your workouts under 120 min at the longest. There are other modifications to make them shorter too, of course.

-Jordan

Thanks Jordan. Powerlifting II looks like the ticket right now. I’ll give it a shot.

And yeah… I probably could be a bit more disciplined with my rest periods.