My schedule lately has made following a program a joke, and I’d hoped to do 5/3/1 variants until I’m sick of 'em (I’m not). This is likely to remain true for quite some time given all currently known factors.
Given that, and my past experience (I’m a grey beard) has got me thinking about autoregulating my training around the big compounds. Specifically, pick a rep range to target for the day and lift. Pick an assistance lift, pick a rep range and go. When time is up or enough lifting has been done, go home.
Once things stabilize, retest my 1RM and determine if I go back to programmatic training or not.
“I’m not doing jack shit” from the first 5/3/1 book might be what you are looking for. I just read a lot though, I can’t tell you from experience — nor have I read anything — how that works as a long haul solution.
I don’t know you, so I don’t know how hard you push yourself, so the following does not necessarily apply but, let’s say you choose 3-5/6-8/5-9/8-12 or whatever range. If you can’t beat your previous session, either by doing more reps, more weight, or better reps, then whatever you did was either,
Not enough of a stimulus,
Too taxing in relation to everything else to allow you to recover.
Hopefully you have the experience to know which one. But that’s just in relation to the previous session, of course.
@T3hPwnisher once wrote something, and I didn’t find the exact quote, that as long as he feels that he put in genuine effort to express as much strength as he could given how he was fairing that day he’d reason that it’d make him stronger in the long run. Even if he didn’t beat the logbook.
Here’s another idea: you could work up to a crisp single and let that be your “max” and then do three back-off sets of ten based on that trying to accelerate the bar as hard as possible. Still not 5/3/1, but certainly auto-regulatory. From Base Building if memory serves.
In my opinion auto regulation (within reason) is the optimal way for people that don’t have consistency in their life to train. For example people who work swing shifts or hours that are always changing. Or have hard labor jobs. That being said if you work a 9 to 5 and have a consistent diet and sleep pattern I think you can get better results from set in stone programing.
I don’t like to leave the gym before I’m done enough. That said, whether I train in the strength realm or the BB realm, I push to near failure often enough to generate results. I appreciate your thoughts on this!