Questions on Powerbuilding I (Progression, changing exercise selection)

Hi,

After posting here a few weeks ago I decided to pick up the Powerbuilding I (PBI) template; I’m on week 3 right now and it’s enjoyable and off to a decent start, I think. So far the only “bad” thing is that my week 3 day 1 press performance wasn’t as good as I hoped so the e1rm went down a little bit, from 119 on week 2 to 117 on week 3.

I’m not really stressing over this since everything else is going good or better than expected, but I wanted to verify how the progression should work in cases like these.

My assumption based on the program PDF is that repeating the day is unnecessary/not how the program works, and that I should just continue as normal, and on week 4 just plug in 117 + ~3-5 pounds as I normally would (while paying attention to RPE, of course). Is this accurate?

My second unrelated question is that for day 3 I did incline bench as Exercise 2 for weeks 1 and 2. However, I realize now I actually care more about my bench than press, and suspect(?) that close grip bench might be more specific and thus help more than incline. Is it fine to switch over for the next 3 weeks (since after that the program switches to paused bench anyway) or should I keep doing incline for program consistency or some other reason?

Thanks for your time,
Jon

Jon,

Thanks for the post. For your first question, I would not plug-in any weights to the log to predict your performance, but yes a general range like 110-120 in this case can be useful. For your second question, I do think that close grip is more specific than the incline bench, but I don’t know that you need to specialize this much at this point in your training career. While it is fine to switch if you want, I wouldn’t advocate for that your first time around with this template.

-Jordan

Hi Jordan,

Thanks a lot for the response. About plugging in a weight, I meant using putting in e.g. 117+5 pounds into the 1 rep @ RPE 10 spot in the calculator tab and then plan to hit the calculated 8@8 on week 4. That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing so far for the exercises based on the program PDF (p. 21 for PBI). I think that’s the idea, right?

Thanks,
Jon

You can use that to bracket your expectations, e.g. if you’re feeling good that would be one way to estimate the load you might select for the working sets’ or top set’s weight.

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Sounds good, thanks a lot for your time Jordan.