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?