Trying to understand why I regressed on the last week of The Bridge

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I recently ran the 8 week program The Bridge and have purchased the Strength 1 Template, to use after in order to get prepared for my first meet. I was progressing so nicely on The Bridge and making great progress, especially about week 5 and 6. It was like magic for my squat and bench. Maybe I added too much weight during that time in my excitement? My deadlift started going down after week 6. All my main lifts went down drastically during week 8. I just felt so weak and lifts I would do for warm up the previous week, I would fail during this last week. I am starting the Strength Template in a few days and am assessing my progress and seeing what my body responded to or didn’t and want to learn from this situation. Is it just fatigue and this low stress week is here to get me ready for next week so I shouldn’t worry too much about it? Or was I overshooting my RPE during the bridge and that’s why my lifts seemed to go up so well and am now regressing. I tried to add a little more each week, depending on how it felt, while trying to maintain desired RPE. I may have went a little too high on the introduced singles later in the program, because I had never done them and was so excited to do them.

As far as starting my next template, should I just use the latest estimated (and lower) 1 RM or the higher ones I had during the program? I am only using them as guidelines to help me set goal weights for each set this first week. RPE will be the decider but I’d like to have a defined number so I can gauge progress as well. It seems I just do better when being held back and conservative with the weights. Grrr… I just feel a little defeated by this week because its such low volume and I still was showing such a loss of strength. Any thoughts? It is my first time ever posting about anything on a forum.

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This might be a question better answered by the Docs. My interpretation of what they have previously posted is that plateauing/regressing is just a sign that you should switch things up. The templates seem to all start with an easy week, so that should get you refreshed to start the new training.

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Thank you. Yes, I get that. I just was wondering a little more on why because it’s an 8 week program and if I did something wrong I don’t want to continue this on a longer template and have everything go down right before the meet. :slight_smile: I appreciate your reply

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I don’t know for sure but I have an opinion. The bridge is a lot of sets and reps with weights that are intended to be challenging (I’m pretty sure by the end of it you are doing some RPE 9s). I believe you are, over all, are just feeling a bit fatigued; I am confident that you actually got stronger and did not do anything wrong, as far as programming. I believe the program is designed like this because it’s for folks coming off of a LP that are not really doing all that much volume. I liked running the bridge 3 after the bridge 1 but the strength template will prob be even better before a meet.