The days in bold are the workouts in question. I feel as though my deadlift day is too close to the following squat day (Only 48 hours) because every time that squat day comes up I feel like shit, my lower back is on fire and pumped, I can’t keep my brace properly and I just generally feel weaker and need longer between my sets. It turns what is usually an RPE 8 - 8.5 on a Monday squat day into an RPE 10. I have over a 600lb deadlift and close to a 500lb squat so I believe the amount of volume I need to do for my deadlift can not be appropriately done in one day without producing a crazy amount of fatigue that I can not recover from in time for Friday squats.
My first thought would be to split my deadlift volume up into 2 days and just do it on the same day as my squats but I am worried this will compromise my deadlift training because doing them after squats is very hard and I’ll have to drastically lower the intensity and doing them before squats will make squatting very hard and I’ll have to lower the intensity drastically on those. I only have 8 weeks till my meet so I don’t wanna screw up my programming by changing anything and making it worse than it already is.
First, in the engineering career field we have a saying called “trying to reinvent the wheel” that we use when someone is spending tons of time and effort to do something, when they can just simply leverage some existing resources and be done with it. Learning to program for yourself is a great goal, but most people that program don’t literally write everything from the ground up. They usually take some existing framework that works for them and modify it to their means. BBM is even an example of this, as Jordan has been coached by RTS’s Mike T for many years, and as such BBM programs heavily leverage some of RTS’s training structures and ideas modified to fit their target audience’s goals. I probably would not recommend reinventing the wheel when it comes to peaking for a meet especially. What I would personally do in your position is pick up their 12 week strength program and start with the week that places the final test day of the program on your meet day. Bonus is that the 12 week strength is a great skeleton to start with, you can take what they have done there and experiment with it and customize it to your hearts content in the future.
Also, why do you feel you need to be fully recovered to squat the second day of the week? I would argue that there is only one single day that you should be fully recovered, and that’s the day you’re competing. If you’re still in a strength development block and you’re recovered, you’re doing it wrong, imo. RPE is meant for this case specifically. If you can’t squat as much weight the second day of the week, so be it. You’re still getting a valid training stress. Jordan and Austin lift full body 4 days per week with 600+ squat and deadlift and do just fine. I guarantee if you ask them if they feel great on their second or third day squatting for the week they will tell you no, but they don’t try to program around this inevitability. Mike T also typically programs 4 day per week full body for a large chunk of his elite competitors. It’s ok to not be fully recovered. Might also be a good excuse to mix in a squat variation as opposed to just sticking to the comp movement? Then maybe having less weight on the bar won’t psychologically effect you as much as you’ll be expecting to lift less on a variation anyways? Not to mention, your week to week progress will be comparable because you’ll simply always be lifting with that variation when you’re fatigued.
Jordan coached me for about 6 months and now I’m being coach by RTS. They have both used the same setup for me. Mon - Comp. Squat, Wed. - Paused Squat or some other squat variation, Fri. - Deadlift. I feel like it works well.
Maybe that is actually intentional.
If you stick to the prescribed RPE the absolute stress will be lower on your second squat day. You will recover faster from that workout. Still you’ll have put in a decent amount of work.
Weird I didn’t really think of it like that, I’ve been using linear progression twice weekly and am just focused on adding 5lbs to the bar every time. I suppose it would be a good idea to switch to once weekly linear progression and have the 2nd squat day just be RPE based keeping it around the same difficulty as the first day but at a lower intensity due to fatigue.
I’m also going to try to deadlift more often and lower the intensity there too so it doesn’t kill me so much.
Yeah, it sounds like you aren’t accounting for training fatigue here during the week. Also if you’re in meet prep, you’re going to need to be able to squat and pull within hours of each other. So that’s another factor to consider when planning your meet prep. Are you also mentally prepared to pull heavy after a heavy squat?