Should weight on the bar go up every week on the competition lifts? (The Bridge)

Training Q&A [Moderated]
1

I’m on my third week of The Bridge 2.0 and the lifts are feeling pretty heavy. I understand that the top worksets should stay @ RPE 8, but is the assumption that the weight on the bar should go up every week, even though volume is also going up?

For example:

Week 1 Competition Squat: 1x310 @ 8, 5x270 @ 8 x 2 sets
Week 2 Competition Squat: 1x315 @ 8, 5x275 @ 8 x 3 sets <— last set felt like 8.5/9 due to added volume

I had a similar issue when I previously ran The Bridge 1.0 before this. My lifts didn’t really go up at all due to overshooting.

2

Ideally your e1RM goes up week to week. With that said,

  1. humans are not robots, and performance can fluctuate from week to week for a number of reasons, as I’m sure you’re aware
  2. there is a very high degree of inter-individual variation in responsiveness to a given training intervention. In other words, the program may or may not be appropriate for you, and we don’t have enough information to tell you for sure.

But, to address your issues more directly:

First question would be whether you are starting out at the prescribed effort levels (in other words, whether your week 1 squats were really @8, or whether you overshot).

Second thing to address – when you have multiple work sets listed @8, if you notice them creeping up to @9-9.5, it’s OK to adjust the weight down to maintain the RPE target. This may help avoid some unnecessary fatigue that impacts your subsequent week’s performance.

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3

Are you supposed to be testing your single at @8 every training session on the bridge to determine work volume?

4

No, you only do singles @ 8 if it says to do a single @ 8.

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5

Thanks for the in-depth response, Austin. I’ll try to be more honest with gauging RPE, and if e1RM’s don’t go up, I’ll try out the group programming I suppose