Anyone here alternate squats and deadlifts from week to week? Thinking of doing squats one week, and front squats and deadlifts the next to help with recovery.
I did for a bit but then switched it and was pulling twice a week 1 to 600 the other to 700+. The less you squat the longer you’ll feel sore after squatting. If you squat everyday you ll never be sore. Recently been going 455+ 5 or more days a week. No soreness at all.
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Even if you can’t recover from squatting and deadlifting heavy every week you would be better off doing a light session to maintain technique. Maybe you are doing too much in one workout.
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I guess it would depend on how many other leg exercises you are doing. When you say dead lift one week and squat the other week, do you mean squat or dead lift every day of that week? Or do you mean going to the gym three days a week and on one of those days dead lifting or squatting very heavy and on the other days doing other stuff? I think it’s pretty reasonable to have a really heavy squat or dead lift day on alternating weeks as long as you are doing front squats, box squats, loaded carries, etc. on the other days.
Almost seems like the Lilliebridge method
Probably this to some extent. Either that or you are lifting at such as high level that you just generate loads of fatigue.
It’s not like how you train is completely out of your control. Have a play with some variables e.g. volume or intensity to enable you to recover within the same week.
Twice a week isn’t really high frequency. More like minimum frequency if you need the opportunities to practice technique.
I took a look at your training log and I see exactly what the problem is: you are squatting and deadlifting heavy in the same workout. That is definitely going to be hard to recover from. You just need to change your setup and you should be fine, if you were squatting and pulling 700+ or you were a senior citizen then maybe you would have a good reason to only train one of the two each week but in your case it doesn’t make sense. Try something like squat and lower body assistance on one day, could do some light deadlifts as well, and a couple days later light squat and heavy deadlift plus more lower body assistance.
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My best meet squat is 600 and best meet deadlift is 510, so I’m not a beginner or anything like that. I’m dealing with sciatica right now and it makes it hard to squat more than once a week. I normally do them on different days, just this training cycle I decided to try and put them together. My lower back was taking a beating so I experimented on doing them on the same day. The front Squats would be heavy on the deadlift week , so it wouldn’t be like I’m taking a week off from squatting.
Thanks for all the suggestions everyone. I will use them and see how things go
If you have injuries or whatever that you have to work around then I can understand what you are trying to do, but still it could be done better. Just the simple fact that you have so much spinal loading in one workout is going to be a problem, it would be better to split it into a squat day and deadlift day with assistance for each lift and if you can’t go heavy on both in one week then it would make sense to just do light squat with your competition stance every second week rather than front squatting because it’s almost guaranteed that your technique will suffer.
I also noticed that you only bench once a week, realistically you should be benching at least twice a week. Trying to do too much in one session is not good because it’s harder to recover from than the same workload split between two days and you also don’t get to practice the actual movement very often.
For this thread you should mention that they are not raw numbers. I think you should build up your raw strength which you can get away with hitting quite often. Depending if you have a meet coming up id day 6 months with little to no suit.
With work it makes it difficult to be able to get to the gym more than 3 days a week. I’ve benched over 400 doing it once a week with no problem
Yeah I do alot of raw work in my offseason. And yes I compete single ply.
If you can only train 3x/week then train full body. A 400 equipped bench is nothing to brag about. I see your work sets are in the 200’s. I’m not trying to be an asshole, but realistically you need to put more effort into the things that are going to pay off and if time and recovery are issues for you then drop some of the accessory work you are doing like side raises and leg extensions. It’s questionable whether those actually do anything to help your lifts and they certainly do take time and have a recovery cost as well, it would be better to do more volume on variations of the main lifts.
What is the underlying cause of the sciatica?
Wasn’t bragging about anything. I know it isn’t great or anything. I train by myself so I don’t think I do to damn bad.
Training alone is no excuse for anything, some of the best lifters train alone. I train alone and I’m not far off from a 400 raw bench, with no handoff. It looks like you put plenty of effort into your workouts, but what you are doing is far from optimal,