Looking for Recommendations after the Bridge

Male/6’0"/207lbs/22 S/B/D @RPE 8: 410/285/445

First, I would like to thank you guys for all of your resources I’ve been a long time Alan Thrall fan and found out about you guys a few months ago and since have greatly increased my knowledge of training in large part to your resources!

My goals: Mainly Focus on strength but hypertrophy gains are never unappreciated. I also only have 3 days per week to workout due to school this semester. I’m toying with the idea of doing a meet but it would not be until sometime in the summer.

Now for a preface to my question: Tomorrow (Friday) is my last workout of the Bridge on week 8. I have made tremendous progress taking my max high bar squat (I didn’t lowbar until running the bridge) of 300x2 to a 410 single at RPE 8 lowbar. I increased my bench atleast 30lb based on my 285 RPE 8 single and took my deadlift from a 385x2 to a 445 single at 8. This progress is way more than I expected and and a incredibly glad I found your program. However, this leaves me in a state of uncertainty about what to do next. Even with such tremendous progress, I do not think I took full advantage of the bridge due to the first 3 weeks of the program where I was learning lowbar and learning RPE. I was squatting 250 for 5s at the start and 350 for 3s towards the end and I believe the progress was much more technique related than strength related. Thus, I think I would benefit from running it again as I have much more experience with lowbar and my ability to accurately judge RPE.

Questions:

  1. Should I rerun the bridge?

  2. If so, I’d like to do a little more pressing and was thinking about adding a pressing variation to one of the non-heavy press days. What would you recommend to add in a little more pressing volume? I was thinking potentially starting with 8 x 2 @ RPE 7-8 for the low stress and increasing sets for the more stressful weeks.

  3. I’ve also come to quite enjoy hitting singles @ 8 to start off my lift and was planning to do singles @ 7 for the first 5 weeks then singles @ 8 as planned on the Bridge. These have been invaluable in finding correct working weights. Is this a good idea?

  4. If there are any other modifications I should be thinking about when re running, I would greatly appreciate you guys mentioning them.

Best,

Pat

  1. Sure, you can run it again.

  2. You could add some pressing in on the GPP day, or if you had time to add some more pressing/pin pressing at the end of session 1 or 3.

  3. We did not include the singles throughout this program on purpose; if you like hitting those more frequently, the HLM or 12 week strength templates might fit your needs better.

  4. This question is basically asking for 1-on-1 coaching advice, which requires knowing a lot more about you than we can do here.