Well put. This is me (except instead of Sheiko insert standard bodybuilding). I’m sure other stuff works, but once something works it’s hard to change.
And if something works there is no need for change?
1 Like
Depends why you’re changing and how well it’s working. If it’s working, you know it’s working, and any progress is nothing to be sniffed at after a certain point.
There is no guarantee that what you change to will give you any progress, let alone better progress.
Unless you have a good level of confidence that what you are changing to will give you at least as much progress, then yes I’d say it would be wise to view changing program with hesitance.
1 Like
Well, you could get weaker. Or injured.
It depends. If you are training for 3 hours at a time and realize that you could be making the same progress with a lot less work then it might be worth experimenting. But generally speaking, if you are making steady progress and are happy with the way you are training then I would just stick with it.
2 Likes
A good point, which is the logic I’ve used for the last year, I may still stick with it next year tbh for exactly the reason you mentioned
Its a tempting idea, but I’m still on the fence. It’s worked well for my total, just not my bench.
Maybe then just change up your bench programing.
Are you on a Sheiko program?
I’d say by definition there’s no need. Like the other two said, there may still be reasons to change, and I myself am trying to say a change could likely be useful; there’s just some mental hesitance when you have already landed on something effective
1 Like
That’s what it was! Holy shit that stuff was hard. Dudes dropping like flies on the Facebook group. I remember getting some bloodwork done and my free test was nonexistent. Since I didn’t know any better I thought I had bad genetics lol. Anyways
1 Like
I remember my last day on that program, it was Thursday on week 3. I was supposed to squat but I couldn’t even brace properly, my spine was like a noodle. What was supposed to be @7 was @10 and a rep short. I stopped there and moved onto bench, which was down by like 30lbs or something. I have never gotten so beat up so fast as that program.
Do you do any lift rotation or just pull every week from the floor?
By rotation I mean variations, paused, deficit etc
I know you said you’d been doing some CAT stuff as volume. This is kinda what I’m doing at the moment.
This is pretty interesting to me (probably because I don’t know anything about it). Do you have your free test from lower volume periods to compare to? What about other markers - did anything else change?
Yea Sheiko is my go to for most of the year, especially when I need a 3 day program. I’m hesitant to Frankenstein it, might end up getting nothing from either, rather than best of both, but I might go for some tweaks to lower volume, possibly frequency too, and up intensity.
Sheiko offers bench specialty programming. Where do you get your programs from?
I’m using official Sheiko programs, but I haven’t actually tried the bench specific. I’ve got it lined up as an option for after my next competition.
Mike T reads your thoughts:
RTS has become a lot more sensible since this guy joined them.
Sky high cholesterol because I was stuffing my face to keep up with the program. Like LDL 290, ridiculousness. And because bros all around the internet reiterate that “there ain’t no overtraining just eat and sleep more you wimp”. HBA1c creeping up to prediabetic levels too ie 6.0%. And I’ve never ever had junk food or sugary crap or bagels or shit carbs or fats. But back in those days I’d have full fat dairy, 80% lean beef, all the pasta etc. Seriously retarded.
Yeah I’ve had everything come back to normal ever since. It’s no mystery that hard training destroys the adrenals, thyroid, shoot up cortisol and SHBG etc.
3 Likes
That’s wild. Like seriously scary numbers and you’re trying to the right things! Talk about backfire. Just not fair. Thanks for the detail.
What was the training? Just crazy high volume/ intensity? What did you scale back to for your normal?
Iirc it was 4 days a week, 4 compound exercises /day, one of them would be going up to 1 single @rpe9 and the other 3 are 5x5 @70% ish. @chris_ottawa might know better I haven’t kept the workouts
What seems to work best for me is ramping up to one heavy top set 531 style then doing some assistance with dumbbells or machines depending on how I feel that day. I’ve tried FSL again but it just sucks, I feel like after the adrenaline of that one top set I’m spent and moving on is the most reasonable thing to do. Assistance could be 1,2 or 3 exercises, 2 sets of 6-10 reps. I like to top it all off with a bit of pump work doing some superset just for fun and the lil dopamine kick of looking swole for a few minutes.
Fairly minimalistic but I don’t want to wake up feeling like shit ever. The #1 factor for guaranteed recovery is premium sleep quality. If you wake up feeling off you trained too hard IMO
1 Like
Sure. Also there is life. I need to scale down my training time in certain times/year. So I need to understand that when I’m thinking programming and periodization. How much I’m willing to spend in the gym and doing recovery stuff in home on rest days.
I was mostly referring to the classic mistake (everybody has done it): lifter is doing 5x5 for squats, once a week. He is feeling good and making progress. But for some reason he ends up reading some stuff about training and decides to increase/decrease volume, or add another squat day or something else and so on…
Of course there are people who aim for the top, and they can’t always be happy doing “some progress”. But they play different game.
About the Mike T - even though he seems to use pretty rough training (finding the maximum volume/intensity/frequency lifter can recover), he also strongly advocates that more is not always better. Just watched one video (not the linked one) where he criticized PL population being too fixed to certain paradigms, like high frequency training for example.
PS. Yeah. Might be that the guy in Strongmangoals vid has something to do with this new approach. I’ve understood Mike also collects pretty systematically data from the people he coaches, and might have noticed that not all are capable doing insane amount of heavy work in a week.
No, I just pull from the floor at the moment. The only variation I ever found to be any real use for me is deficit pulls, but I’m not even doing those right now.
When I do singles at 80% it’s CAT. I tried doing a bunch of volume for deadlift in the past, like 5-8 sets of 3 with 70-75%, it never really did anything for me. Heavy top sets, maybe a down set, and singles at 80-85% work for me.
CAT work really helped my squat a lot at one point, but more recently seems like it wasn’t doing much for me so I have been doing a few harder sets instead. I’m making progress and I think I’m ahead of where I was before getting injured. I was only really pushing wrapped squats and from time to time SSB, right now I’m sticking with the straight bar and trying to get my non-wrapped squat up since that will obviously help me squat more in the wraps.
Different people respond to different things, anything that isn’t straight bullshit is worth experimenting with, as long as it’s far enough from a meet.