Questions before starting PBIII

Hi,

I’m planning on starting PBIII next week and was wondering if you could answer some questions about the program. I previously went through PBI and PBII and enjoyed them so looking forward to it. I tried searching the forum beforehand so I think these questions hopefully aren’t too repetitive, though there are kind of a bunch of them… greatly appreciate if you’re able to answer.

  1. In a different template (Low fatigue) copenhagen planks were one possibility and I liked doing them, but from what I can tell they don’t seem to be included in any of the slots in PBIII. Do you think that they could have a place in PBIII, and if so, where might you put them?

  2. The quad-accessory slot lists “leg curls” and the hamstring accessory slot lists “hamstring curl”. Are these actually two different exercises? These terms both make me think of this movement.

  3. On the time-cap included on some of the exercise slots: from the included instructions I read about how they’re included as a kind of volume-regulation to match a day’s performance potential. Do you think it’s the case that even if one is not at all time-limited, that they would be better off skipping some of a slot’s volume rather than potentially taking a couple extra minutes to get the total reps done at the right RPE? This kind of confuses me since this kind of regulation doesn’t seem to be present in other high-volume templates, e.g. low-ISF 4 day. Not sure if something else about the template in particular makes it so that it would be important to limit the volume in this way even if time were no issue.

  4. Because of equipment limitations I was thinking of substituting the mid-range pin bench press for the slingshot bench. From the name I assumed the intended location for the pins would be somewhere in the middle of whatever the normal range of motion is, but in one of the only places I could find mentioning the term “mid range” it looks like a pin press just an inch or two off the chest. Should the pins be set up similar to what seems to be shown in this video or should they be much higher up?

  5. Up to now, I’ve been splitting my LISS/HIIT conditioning so that I do 30 min LISS on GPP days (Wed/Sat) on an air bike and then on Mon/Tues/Thurs/Fri I was splitting up the HIIT like bike/rower/rower/rower. I think I’m probably going to stick to just using the air bike and rower; do you think it matters much if I’m only using the rower for HIIT and not LISS or might I benefit from splitting the LISS between bike and rower? I have no endurance goals other than health benefits of doing conditioning.

  6. Finally, it looks like week 10 - day 3 - exercise 3 is set to follow the exercise selection for block 3 instead of block 2. I assume this is a typo?

Thanks very much for your time.
-Jon

Jon,

Thanks for the post. For your questions:

  1. I think if you want to do them at the end of a session- likely on the day you’re squatting or deadlifting heavy, that’d be fine.

  2. Looks like that’s a typo. Thanks for catching it!

  3. I would maintain the time cap, yes. Some of our other high volume templates have this baked in as well. Point is, doing more isn’t better if you’re not up to it.

  4. I’d place the pins somewhere between 1 and 3" off your chest.

  5. I don’t think the modality matters much for conditioning, no.

  6. Yep, looks like some formatting was off. You can re download the corrected version now.

Thanks a lot for the info, Jordan! Really appreciate your time.