Strenght 3 - DL and SQ going down

Training Q&A [Moderated]
1

I’m on week 10 of strength 3, on week 9 my squat was 1@RPE8@175kg, DL 1@8@185. This week I squatted a single @ 8.5 at 175, drop sets felt heavier; but on the next day the DL went to the gutter: 1@8@170 kg, 15 kilos in one week. I know this is not an actual loss of performance due to sickness or witchcraft. Fatigue has been creeping up since week 6 or so. The pivot on week 7 helped to get things back to normal, but the higher intensities of W8, W9 and W10 made it all creep back up.

As a sidenote, I don’t think I misjudge RPE, I normally try 3RMs when I finish training cycles and they align with my estimations.

My upper body lifts are OK and still going up about a kilo a week, so all good there. My hypothesis is that I just fatigue too much in my lower body lifts, this is not the first time this has happened to me, I’ve been having some soreness and feeling of stiffness in my quads and TFL. My plan:

I am going to do 3 sets @4, 5 and 6 for my lower body lifts (upper stays the same) on D3 and D4 of week 10 and then I will just run the powerbuilding 3 template, it starts with a low stress week, so that should aid recovery.

  1. Am I on the right track?

  2. Should I do the Powerbuilding 3 template as written or modify volume accordingly? I suspect RPE 7 will work better for me overall…

  3. In my lower body lifts when I feel I can add weight to the bar I do, but after 2 weeks fatigue starts to creep up. It’s like strength is OK but endurance is off. Should I try adding a set before adding weight for a week or two and then remove that set and add weight? I just can’t get consistent lower body strength gains.

Thank you,

Martin

44y/o 91kg
SQ 187kg
DL 197kg
Bench 141kg

2

  1. I think this is a reasonable thing to try. 2) Moving forward, if you recognize similar patterns in the upcoming template that you know you don’t respond as well to, modification would probably be wise as well.

  2. This is tough to predict. I’m not sure that ‘endurance’ is the issue here, though. I’d try to keep intensity in check to mitigate that fatigue accumulation, which may involve maintaining a bigger “split” in intensity between your top sets (which will need to stay relatively heavy) and your backoff/volume work (which may benefit from being a bit lighter OR further from failure at a given load). A lot of this is what we tried to address in the low fatigue template, and is discussed in several of our recent podcasts.

3

#3 makes a lot of sense. My intuition was telling me to do exactly that, lower 5% or so in the drop sets, but I was not sure how that would go.

how would I do that in powerbulding 3? Do I do it as planned and lower reps in a set to keep the effort at 7 or do I do a top set at 7 and then drop 4-8% and carry on?

Thanks!