Hey CT, I had a question about your current methodology that’s really been on my mind lately. I posted it in another thread but didn’t you’d see it there so I’ve started a new thread so I could get your input.
What are your thoughts about a sort of combination of the layering approach and the waveloading featured so prominently in the HP Mass program?
I was thinking about switching things up a little by performing a 5-day split as follows:
clean and press
front squats
SGHP
bench press
SGHP
I hate taking days off and I really liked the HP Mass program for that reason; I always had enough in the tank to just keep lifting on the main movements and really only took days off when other things unrelated to working out would come up.
So my idea was to perform one movement per day by ramping up a 1RM, then dropping down to 85-90% and waveloading back up to the 1RM, then drop down to 70% of the 1RM and ramping up to a 2RM, drop down to 85-90%, waveloading back to the 2RM, dropping down to 70% of the 2RM, ramping back up to a 3RM, dropping down to 85-90% of the 3RM and waveloading back up to the 3RM.
So it’s just a ramp to 1RM, a wave, ramp to a 2RM, a wave, ramp to a 3RM, a wave and then do maybe 4-6 sets of 8-15 reps on some sort of assistance exercise. I thought I would add a wave to the 3-rep wave the second week, a wave to the 2-rep wave the third week, a wave to the 1-rep wave the fourth week, and then a third wave to the 1-rep waves the fifth week. After that I could do the start over with variations of the same lifts.
What are your thoughts on this?
Hey,
i’m no CT but…
your training split has potential problems;
Clean and press then front squats then SGHP’s? your performance will probably decrease across the three days due to all that hamstring/glute/lower back work… depending on your Clean and Press technique, your quads could also suffer on Front Squat day.
regarding the parameters, it just looks like a strength focused layer approach -seems ok if thats your goal??
interested to see what CT has to say about it all.
[quote]lboro21 wrote:
Hey,
i’m no CT but…
your training split has potential problems;
Clean and press then front squats then SGHP’s? your performance will probably decrease across the three days due to all that hamstring/glute/lower back work… depending on your Clean and Press technique, your quads could also suffer on Front Squat day.
regarding the parameters, it just looks like a strength focused layer approach -seems ok if thats your goal??
interested to see what CT has to say about it all.[/quote]
Well, I think that the split itself won’t be too problematic since I’ll be performing the cleans from a hang or off blocks and my press is weaker than my clean. Basically, I’ll be catching my max pressing weight pretty high, so the way I look at it, the clean portion of it will activate my lower half nicely for the following day’s front squats. Plus, I’m always willing to substitute a neural charge workout on the days I feel a bit lethargic and can just bump the main movement back a day.
Well, I’ve tried this out for two straight days now. I started with front squats last night and did high pulls tonight. I felt great both workouts. I expected to get my 2RM up to right about where my 1RM was on the first ramp, but that didn’t happen. However, on front squats I was able to ramp my 3RM up to what my 2RM was and got a pretty nice 3-rep wave out of that.
When I performed high pulls tonight I hit a new PR with my 1RM (225) then hit 205 with my 2RM but managed to get to 215 with my 3RM, although when I dropped down to wave back up to 215, the second time I hit 215 for 3 wasn’t quite as efficient as I would have liked.
But all in all, I like the approach so far. I admit, I don’t really like doing the cluster sets or the 5/4/3/2/1 sets because they leave me drained. I eat really healthy and I suppose my pre-workout nutrition is pretty good, but I’m not a big supplementation guy so that part of the layering tends to wipe me out sometimes. So the waveloading with maximum weights that I can still explode with at different rep numbers seems like it might be a really good way to get quality reps that drive home performance and efficient movement while working at varying intensity levels.
I’m going to give this approach at least a month, and then I’ll report back about what sort of progress I made.