So I’m just finishing up my first cycle of Building the Monolith and I’m all about it. The volume is great and I’m responding well to it. But it is my understanding that BtM isn’t meant to be done more than 1 cycle at a time. So my questions are:
How many cycles of something else should be done before jumping back into BtM? Is 1 cycle of something else enough before staring BtM again?
I really like the full body workouts - essentially everything about BtM works really well for me. What would be the best templates I could cycle in between BtM cycles? Triumvirate from the first 5/3/1 book is one that comes to mind for the full body aspects. Were there any templates that are particularly well paired with BtM to make a full year plan?
Oh, when I read that I took it to mean that if you started with a lower TM, then you could do one more cycle after the first. It isn’t meant to be run repeatedly though right?
I’m not intimately familiar with many templates from experience, but just to encourage thought I’d say that once you stop progressing with a size-oriented program/template to do a stint of higher intensity work to realize the strength improvements.
Yeah I read through those previous posts first and it felt like the responses were so different between them and I still felt unsure. But now going back and looking at them it suddenly clicked with me that BBB is really more of a leader and doesn’t make much sense. God is a Beast (anchor) is, in many ways, similar to 5/3/1 PR / 5x5 FSL and both seem like logical anchors to BtM.
No worries. Sometimes it takes reading something a few times before it clicks. Sometimes it has to be read in other words for the whole picture to crystalize too. It rarely does until one finds the terminology that portrays the relevant information in a way that is intuitive to whomever consumes it. That’s why it is valuable that there are so many authors, even when their material overlaps.
I still sometimes have to look-up “leader” and “anchor” as I forget which is which, but as long as I can remember one of the proposed ratios between them (2:1) I can figure it out in reverse.
And with regards to running BtM several times I’ll quote something I read recently,
It’s important to note that unless your experience dictates otherwise, if
a program/training strategy continues to be productive (without signs of
slowing down), then one is often best served to ride the program out: Don’t
switch programs just for the sake of doing so, but keep in mind that the law
of diminishing returns will apply to some degree.
— Dr. Scott Stevenson
i.e., you don’t have to switch to an anchor just because you’ve done BtM. So this
Assess and adjust and run it again if you feel good
applies just as well the second time you complete the program as the first time. Presumably.
