Trying to lose weight and feeling beat up

Hello coaches,

I am currently preparing for what I’ll hope will be my first power meet around January-February, provided we are lucky enough not to be on lockdown again by then (I live in Spain and things are kinda messy around here).

I 've been strength training for a bit less than a year, and I’m trying to fit in the 83 kg category, now sitting at around 85 kg.

My training history involves 2 months of Starting Strength with a lot of whole milk and a little over 3 months on the Beginner Template until COVID hit us.
When everything started opening again by summer, I joined a localpowerlifting gym and hired a coach to help me with my programming and technique. 7 weeks later, I set my first 1RM’s on the big 3 (160 SQ, 97.5 BP and 180 DL) which made me all warm and fuzzy inside.

After this, I had a mesocycle of another 7 weeks with tons of volume (but really low reps per set in SBD, which kinda bugged me out) and set some AMRAP PR’s (145kgx8 on SQ, 90x9 on BP and 162.5x5 on DL).
Seeing these results, my coach thought I had improved enough to test some 2-3RMs the following week.

At this point, which was about a month ago, everything started to go a bit worse. I grinded through a 165x1 SQ, had a nice RPE 8 100x3 bench and another extremely grindy 180x1 DL (no improvement here).
Since then, I feel as I haven’t been able to fully recover.

I’m curently in the middle of a new mesocycle, with higher volume in accesory work and corrective technique exercises to aid with the caloric deficit, but feel like the extra work is actually making things even harder.

The couple of times I’ve approached my coach telling him that I feel weaker, he’s just told me that it’s the accumulated fatigue and that it’ll get better if I push through it.

Any recommendations on how to deal with this situation?

Thanks in advance

The couple of times I’ve approached my coach telling him that I feel weaker, he’s just told me that it’s the accumulated fatigue and that it’ll get better if I push through it.

That may be true and if you have confidence in this coach, I’d recommend seeing the program through. Hard for me to comment without knowing specifics. That said, I don’t think the calorie deficit has anything to do with your recovery and wouldn’t think too much about it. I’d look more at session RPE’s, ratings of fatigue, and long term trends in e1RM in the context of programming goals.

Thanks for your answer!