I’m on week 4 of PL II and feeling beat up. For more context, this my third time peaking and ran the bridge and then strength 12 week before this. I feel like I should be doing off season work, but trying to make this work as I’m on prep for a meet at the end of February. Feeling pretty beat up and everything feels heavy. I was suggested here to reduce RPE by 2-3 for a few weeks and see how I respond. My question is how should I do my backdowns. If I reduce my top singles down to a 6, and my top 5 rep set down to a 7, how should I treat the backdowns.
If you’ve been doing this for 2-3 weeks, are only 4-weeks into the template, and still don’t feel great, I would strongly reconsider the meet in February given your current training resources. In short, I don’t know that there’s a productive way to modify things further, for longer.
When I reduce RPE targets, I typically aim to keep the same spread percentage-wise between the top set or single and the back off work. If the top set was ~ 83% e1RM and the back off work was ~ 75% e1RM, I’d keep the 8% gap between your new top set and the back off work.
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I took 2 weeks off since testing for 12 week strength and took full 2 weeks off with 2 light sessions before pivot week. I had a great pivot week and my 5 reps @ 9s matched my estimated reps I finished with. I did deal with something similar weeks 5-6 with strength template, I took a traditional deload rather than what is programmed for week 7. I hope that it’s just the volume wearing me down and that by week 8, I could have shed fatigue from a deload and ready to peak.
After testing for 12 week strength, I took full 2 weeks off with 2 light sessions before PLII’s pivot week.***
Sounds good. Let us know how it goes!