Question About the Bridge

Training Discussion
1

I finally decided to sign up to the site as I’ve been following you guys for a little while now. I really appreciate the content you’ve made available and I believe it’s helped steer me in the right direction after a few years of training. A short bit of information about me - I’m 6’1, 35 years old and I’ve been lifting weights for 4 years. About a year ago I decided to do 5/3/1 but felt like it was just making me weaker and I eventually came across The Bridge. I never ran SSLP. I saw the amount of volume in The Bridge and thought I needed that to go beyond several plateaus I’ve encountered due to sub-par training methods. I’ve run The Bridge 3 times and noticing my lifts are going up steadily.

I know I can’t run The Bridge indefinitely. Right now I bench 235 x 5, Deadlift 350 x 5, squat 275 x 5 and overhead press 150 x 5. My Deadlift in particular seems to be hit or miss - I’m having a real tough time getting out of the mid 300s for 5 sets of 5 (the most I ever pulled was 370 for 3 reps). I’m sure running another cycle could improve my Deadlift by 10 pounds or so but I expect more out of myself. Since I never ran SSLP I feel as though my numbers could’ve been better by now. What do you recommend? Any help is appreciated. I’ve tried looking up examples of other individuals in my situation but wasn’t successful.

2

I would not suggest SSLP for you, as it doesn’t appear you are a novice.

Any of the following templates should help:

Bridge 2.0
HLM
12 Week Strength
12 Week Press
GPP Hypertrophy.

You might also look into the BBM group training option or coaching.

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3

I don’t believe you’re any weaker because you didn’t do a novice linear progression (Jordan never did one either), and you are certainly not a novice anymore. Doing SSLP now will provide no benefit to you.

You’ve ran the bridge 3x in a row and made progress each time, that is awesome.

I don’t think you should run the bridge a 4th time without changing some training variables. You likely just need some new, novel stress to continue making solid gains, and may or may not need some more volume.

Any of the BBM templates would be excellent options for you: HLM or the Hypertrophy templates if you want 3x/week, or the 12 week strength templates if you want to dedicate 4x/week. The templates are worth every penny.

4

Thank you so much for the response, I will definitely check those out. I appreciate it!

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