After I finished the first cycle of the PowerBuilding II program I posted a few lessons and thoughts on how I’d adjust things for the next cycle. I just finished that cycle and thought I’d share again.
I think the biggest take away is that it worked. It’s been about 3 years since I was last able to hit any PRs, but this cycle got my training numbers back into the territory they were then. That’s pretty damn satisfying, especially as it doesn’t feel like I was driving myself into a wall to get there the way it did last time. At 43 that is not only appreciated, but required.
Some more specific thoughts:
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I’m still shit at RPE. On squats especially, everything feels heavy and even now work sets are back up in the 400s, nothing feels like <8 once it gets to about 275
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I really struggled to finish all the prescribed work for squat and deadlift. For deadlift I was protecting my left hamstring and so just aborted whenever I felt a warning. For squats though, I just didnt have the juice to do it all. I’d get through the first couple of sets and into the back offs, and find myself having to drop weight on successive sets to maintain RPE, but even with that I’d typically stop one set short of the Rxed work. Yet it still worked. I think that’s a pretty good demonstration of the value of autoregulation and accumulating quality work below the highest RPE range.
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After screwing around in the first cycle trying to find a good exercise choice for the main squat accessory, this cycle I just did it as written and committed to high bar. Not a machine that mimics it, but getting a barbell and putting it on the top of my traps and squatting down to below parallel with an upright torso. I am a terrible low bar squatter, and have fought for years against the tendency to to a pseudo high bar with the bar in low bar position. But not only did working hard at high bar make my form on low bar better, the movement variation within the week helped keep long running glute/hip pain at bay. I cannot really explain the form thing other than it reinforcing what high bar is supposed to feel like so that when Im doing low bar on the primary session I know better what it should NOT feel like. Who knows.
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I ran multiple weeks of week 10. I got a significant benefit out of it, but probably ran it too far. By the time I hit week 9 I all of a sudden felt really strong and recovered and so wanted to keep riding that train. But,I think I forgot the point and pushed too hard on the singles. Last week after 2 good feeling and productive sessions at the begiing of the week, I had a car crash of one on thursday and skipped friday all together. A lesson there I think is don’t get greedy with the weight on the singles on a program where the Rxed singles are not supposed to be limit lifts. Also, see comment on RPE.
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I’m contemplating playing with the rep scheme for the next cycle and doing a little bit more work in the 3 rep range. At least for the top sets and then backing off to the Rxed schemes. After 2 back to back cycles of this program, that seemed like a reasonable variation. I just saw the updates to the template and see there are some ideas on how to do that build into there, so that’s good timing.
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Regarding the new templates, I notice it is less RPE focused, at least with the back offs. Is the idea that it’s backed off far enough that even if you’re having a crap day and it’s higher RPE than expected, it should still have been backed off enough to be a reasonable RPE?