Hello, I have read the 531 forever book and have been doing 531 BBB along with FSL. In the book it says to do 25-50 reps of push, pull and core, but for the past few months I have had very slow progression on my accessory lifts, so I wanted to see if anyone here could provide some advice on what to change.
I do 2 different exercises for pull and push each workout and all of them are done in 3 sets of 8-12 reps.
Monday: barbell curl, pull-ups, weighted pushups, tricep pushdown (bar)
Tuesday: incline dumbbell curl, lat pulldown, dips, incline dumbbell press
Thursday: hammer curl, pullups, weighted pushups, tricep pushdown (rope)
Friday: ez bar curl, lat pulldown, dips, incline dumbbell press
It adds up to 48 reps to 72 reps of push and pull each day which exceeds the recommended 50 by a bit. Should I reduce the number of exercises from 2 for pull and push to 1 exercise for each category? I don’t know what else to change in order to continue progressing well. Any advice is appreciated, thanks.
Does the Beefcake template not have this all laid out? Without asking the usual what are your goals etc, I’d just run that. Your layout above screams you’re new to this (four curl variants across four days anyone) so I’d run something written by someone else.
Are you doing any single leg/core work?
I’d pick ONE push, ONE pull and ONE single leg/core exercise and do that for the recommend 25-50 reps. The supplemental work on BBB is going to build plenty of size: the assistance work is just going to hit some neglected areas.
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Agreed. I’d probably also swap one of those many vertical pulls for a horizontal pull. If Back Width is something you’re really chasing then maybe your Pull exercise rotation would be Pull-Up, Barbell Curl, Barbell Row, Lat Pulldown. How much you grow from the Assistance exercises will depend on how intense they are in terms of how close to failure you take those sets.
Just make sure you’re also eating a substantial amount of food to account for all of this training, because this program is hard and has a big recovery demand. Don’t neglect that side of the equation!
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Without digging it out online, is this essentially how the Beefcake template is run? Lots of dips and chins with a dose of single leg work. Darn it I need to find a way to get a chin up set up in the garage to get on board this (sorry to venture away from your question OP).
Ok this is my new plan
Monday: pullups +dips
tuesday: barbell curls + incline dumbbell press
thursday: seated cable rows + dips
friday: incline dumbbell curl + incline dumbbell press
All done for 4 sets 8-12 reps. Do you think this would be good