Lessons from first cycle of Power Building II template

I’ve just finished the first 10 weeks of the Power Building II template. I think it went well, and I definitely enjoyed the focus of looking at the template and just doing what it Rxed, but I definitely could have done some things differently. I’m going to take a week of recovery/work travel and then start another run at it the week after, but I’ve got a couple of questions about some options for this next run

  • Is there a reason you programmed back to back days for squats and deadlift, or do you see any downside from moving Deadlift to day 1? I don’t think I ever got used to squatting 2 days in a row and then not doing so again for the rest of the week and I feel this pattern (dead, sqt variant, LBBS, dead variant) would probably work better for me.

  • How important are single leg exercises? I have had some hip injuries and feel like I’ve lost proprioception and so I absolutely suck at these as all my focus in put towards maintaining balance. I struggled through them in the first cycle where programmed but felt like I had to deload so much to accommodate my difficulty with them that I don’t know they contributed very much.

  • Finally, the messages you gave in your recent programming episodes about the folly of focusing so much on increasing weight on the bar to drive adaptation really resonated with me. I looked at the structure of the 10 weeks and saw how stress would automatically be increased and I think I was too conservative in adding weight where possible. I approached it as if I went into a session feeling beaten up from the previous week, then repeating the same work at the same RPE was an improvement, and the gains would come from the accumulation of work over the 10 weeks and from the gradually increasing workload that was Rxed. I think I should be trying harder to put more weight on the bar week to week when the Rx is comparable, right?

Limie,

Glad you had a good experience with the template! Thanks for sharing.

  1. Yep, I programmed them that way so you would do them at the beginning of the week when you were theoretically freshest. I think putting all the comp lifts together may make for quite a long session and, perhaps, deadlifting under very fatigued settings. It could work though and most of it is personal preference.

  2. I think unilateral work definitely has it’s place in a program like this. If you’re pretty bad at them, I think that suggests an opportunity for improvement, though you may prefer different unilateral work to meet you where you’re at.

  3. I don’t think it matters as much as people think to add weight to the bar as quickly as possible, so I’d prefer a more conservative approach. I would recommend adding weight to the bar when the RPE allows :slight_smile:

Excellent. Thanks for the response, Jordan.

One thing I did find interesting is that while I felt sore quite often and high end strength didn’t move that much, I definitely improved my work capacity as it’s been a while since I consistently did high end rep stuff at that volume and frequency. I’m hoping this will be parlayed into managing the stress of this second cycle a bit better and leading to some decent gain.

Thanks again for the response and the great content you guys are putting out.

Let us know how it goes!