Here’s where I think most people fuck this shit up…
From what I’ve picked out of Jim’s writing over the last few years he generally breaks things down into three specific focuses… strength, mass, or conditioning. The general idea is that when focusing on strength the intensity increases while the volume and conditioning decrease, and when focusing on mass the volume increases while the intensity and conditioning decrease. When focusing on conditioning the conditioning obviously increases while the intensity and volume of weightlifting decrease.
BBB is all about building mass through volume. In the original book Jim specifically tells people to back off the intensity by eliminating the extra reps on the final set. Instead, everyone pushed for extra reps anyway and now that Beyond is out they also stack Jokers on top of it before doing another 50 back off reps. The idea with BBB is to build mass by training like a bodybuilder, yet people want to pile on the intensity like they’re a powerlifter who’s perpetually 6 weeks out from competition.
The drawback to this (IMO) is that it detracts from what comes next. Once you’ve spent a few/several months building your muscle using BBB you want to use that new muscle to develop more strength. This is where you should be piling on the intensity by crushing the PR set and hitting some heavy ass singles/Jokers. By the end of a couple months of this your joints will be angry and you should feel perpeturally uncomfortable yet have some solid PRs to brag about, so you 5/3 deload and let your body heal by spending few months working back up by doing some more BBB and gaining even more mass.
My best results have happened when I took the easy stuff easy and made the hard stuff really fucking hard. That middle zone where I tried to accomplish everything all at once has only resulted in mediocre gains in performance because I’m too fatigued to push the intensity and too burnt out to push the assistance. Unfortunately I didn’t really realize what’s happening at the time because I lacked the experience to know any better… I just assumed I was supposed to feel that way and took comfort in my mediocre progress.
IMO… YMMV.