Hey everyone, I’m in need of some input and guidance.
My squat performance has been very inconsistent lately. I’m running the 12 week program (currently week 9), and my squat single and performance has been very spiky.
Some days, my hips feel powerful when I squat and my knees stays out good. But some weeks, it feels like I have no “oomph” and my hips just feels weak, my knees cave much more and I miss-groove reps. It’s a very big inconsistency that is annoying. I go into each session with the same amount of coffee and hype, but some days I just miss-groove reps, and some days I don’t.
Week 2-5 squat single went from 130 to 137.5kg with good form.
Week 6 I squatted 137.5 @8 with solid form, knees out.
Week 7 I tried 140 and my knees caved like crazy and I had to grind it out with bad form, rated it @9.5
Week 8 I tried 140 again and it just flew up! Knees stayed out and form looked very solid. Rated it @8
Week 9 I tried 140 again, to “solidify” it but my form was shit again and my knees caved and I miss-grooved it completely, and it turned into a real grindy rep. Tried it again 6 min later and it looked the same.
Week 10 I will have to try 140 yet again…
Like really? One week I smoke the weight, next week it’s a sloppy knee-caving fiesta. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I have “only” trained following BBM’s templates for 9 months now, so my experience of doing heavy squat singles is somewhat limited. I just wish my squat form would hold up better and only the bar speed would be the thing that varies.
Idk what to say man, I think you may benefit from dropping it 2-5kg just to keep the form on point whilst keeping it in the prescribed RPE and rep range but if youre progressing keep going. If you want you can ask for a form check in the Facebook group and we’ll gladly help you out.
Are you tracking your warm ups prior to your singles? I ask only because there have been a few posts made regarding similar problems to what you are experiencing, and it turned out none of those trainees were tracking their warm up rpe’s, and therefor had no idea what their @8 actually was for the day. They were making educated guesses based on last week’s training data.
If you are tracking your warm up rpe’s, and you are calculating your jumps to @8’s based on your @7’s and @6’s (the only way to be accurate with your @8 singles), maybe see if something else is going on outside of training. Perhaps you aren’t sleeping great the night before, or perhaps your day at work was strenuous. I don’t know your schedule, but things like that can mess up your perception.
You should expect to get stronger in your @8’s using bbm templates, so this is certainly peculiar.
I don’t usually rate my last warm-ups,no. It has been very inaccurate in the past, like my last warm-up can feel heavier than the planned single @8. If I hit a weight @8 last week, I try to add weight by default the week after. If it was @9 the previous week, I re-do the weight and hopefully it’s an @8 this time.
The weird part to me, is that my deadlift is going up still with 2.5g each week. Deadlift singles started at 135kg @8 and today I hit a super smooth 150kg @8 so my e1rm is going up there! If my deadlift also stalled, I would be worried that my strength didn’t go up. Bench is also trending upwards but much slower, ofc.
And I’ve noticed one peculiar thing about my training performance, anyone else recognize this? My performance always seem to be worse on Mondays (first training day) than the following training days. It’s like getting back from 2 days of full rest takes one day of “waking up” before performance is back to normal. To me it sounds weird, but it’s something I’ve observed over months now. Logically, I would perform better on day 1 because I should be well rested, and no fatigue from previous day affecting performance, but I feel sluggish.
So my thought was to do switch day 1 and 2 on the programs, doing deadlifts on day 1 and saving the c-squat for Tuesdays. Ofc, this could maybe make my deadlift feel weird, but IMO, the deadlift is much more forgiving in terms of form. On the squat, there’s plenty of things that can go wrong.
Yeah, I can see how that experience would make you loose faith in rating your rpe’s that way.
Would you mind giving me an example of your warm-up weights and your planned single on a given day?
Thats great that your deadlift is going up. Has it been increasing steadily from week to week for some time? Or, has it gone up and down, etc over the last few months?
I have experienced what you describe almost every week for the last 5 years of my training. I think it’s some sort of motor learning stuff, where after an extra day to relax over the weekend, it takes a minute longer to get the motor pattern working at the high level we enjoy later on in the week. Adding an extra warm up set or two helps.
I warm up like this for the squat:
Empty bar x5x2
60kg x5
80 x3
100 x1 putting on belt
112.5 x1
122.5 x1
132.5 x1
140 x1 planned single @8.
My DL has gone up almost every week since I started the 12 week program, my squat also did at first but last 3 weeks squat performance has been very up and down as I’ve explained. But the deadlift performance seem to be much more stable.
I can try to warm up more on Monday and see if it helps. I also think I’m gonna have more calories on Sunday/Monday taken from the rest of the week (same total calories, just more food around squat workout) and see if that helps the sluggish feeling and performance.
Today I deviated a bit from the prescribed work just to try some things.
Monday after 2 day of rest: 140kg squat x1 @9.5 with shit form, knee cave, bad bar path etc.
Friday: 140kg squat x2 @ 9 with solid form, some knee cave but excellent bar path and good speed.
I don’t know if you are already doing this, but something that has helped me a ton is taking video of all my working sets. I usually watch the videos between sets. I feel like this has really helped my technique, especially with the squat. When things get wonky, I try to compare those “off” sets to other sets where I felt great.
As far as squat warm-ups are concerned I try and just warm up with light weights until my body feels ready to move on. I try not to have any expectations as to how many reps I need before I add more weight. I realize this is a pretty nebulous statement, but changing my mindset has helped me “feel it” more, which has been good for me…another thing that has really helped during warm ups is incorporating tempo squats and pause squats with very light weight.
Performance was good today again. I guess performance dips happens for whatever reasons, maybe some fatigue build up over time which dissipated. I hit 142.5 @8 and 145 @8.5 today in the squat and it felt great again, really solid form and knees just caving a touch. Looks like a 12-15kg increase in the squat and 17-20kg in the deadlift during the 12 week strength on maintenance calories which is much better than I ever thought.