Resetting in the Middle of a Cycle? Stalling on 3x3

Bigger Stronger Leaner Jim Wendler 5/3/1 Coaching
1

Hey so I been making amazing strength gains using this program. I love it a lot. This is my 7th cycle.

I’ve done a reset once, and I continued to make progress but at that time I reset when I failed on my 5-3-1 weeks.

Fast forward to this week, on my bench and OHP I completely failed on my last set of 3x3. I know i need to reset and i shouldn’t of gotten to this point etc etc.

Would you guys suggest that I finish the cycle and contintue on to my 5-3-1+ week + the deload and THEN reset after? Or should I just go right into deload and not do my 5-3-1+ week?

Any replies or suggestions would be a great help.

2

I love the program alot too but once you get this this point, IMO, its time to switch to another program (at least for awhile) to start making gains again. I personally was in the same boat and switched to a version of conjugate to allow myself to work on weak points and also explosiveness with the use of bands/chains. There are tons of conjugate programs out there, I personally modified one from Brian Alsruhe (Alpha on this site) called Darkhorse, but he does have a straight conjugate program along with that one you can get my simply youtubing his name and program. I have a log on here too of the one I’m doing if you want to see if its something up your alley. Best of luck!

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Scale down your training max and keep going. At some point you can introduce some FSL work.

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I’ll for sure look into this

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Should I scale down now? Or finish my 5/3/1 week? Which is next week for me lol

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It does not matter. You can try if you can do better in the next week. I would still lower the TM, no matter how you’ll do next week.

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So reset TM and then do 5-3-1? Or reset TM and start from 3x5 next week? Or Deload? Sorry haha

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Deload and start new cycle with a lower TM.

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Thanks man. I’m gonna skip my 5-3-1 week and go into Deload and start over with a new TM

10

anymore suggestions on resetting in the middle of a cycle?

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Reset now. You can’t complete the cycle so just back off mid-cycle. This should NEVER have happened. You should always be able to hit 5 strong reps with your TM.

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Thanks Jim.

So I just want to clairfy, even on the 5-3-1+ week I should be still hitting 5 reps on my last set?

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I guess the name 5,3,1 isn’t really relevant as you should be hitting a lot more than these numbers as the max reps each week translate roughly to 75%, 80% and 85% when you take into consideration you are working from 90% of your true 1 rep max.

So on the 531 week the max reps actually work out at only 85% so you should be hitting a lot more than 5.

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You should get AT LEAST 5 reps on your last set. Remember, that even there you only use 95% of your TM. For this reason, Jim introduced the TM-Test on Forever, which asks you to get 5 reps at your TM for the last set (70% x 5, 80% x 5, 90% x 5, 100% x 5).

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AT LEAST 5 reps. Most of my kids can do more.

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Thank you guys.

I’m going to reset my TM and destroy all my rep records