BBB Questions: How Long? Missing Assistance Reps? BBB Weight?

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

Just finished reading the Forever book and putting together a plan for my first program. It looks like this:

2 Leader cycles of 5s Pro + BBB at 50%
7th week
1 Anchor Cycle is 3/5/1 + FSL
7th week

My questions were:

  1. Can you run this as is indefinitely or is it recommended to come up with something different?
  2. If you miss some reps on your assistance work how do you adjust? Does it prevent you from increasing your TM?
  3. Does BBB always stay at 50%?

Thanks!

2

You shouldn’t really be missing BBB reps if your using 50%, some variations of BBB go all the way up to 75% on the 3rd week so 50% should be more than low enough to not miss reps.

3

If you’re missing reps at 50%, your TM is incredibly off, shouldn’t happen.
As written in the book, 50-60% is the generic range recommended for BBB depending on various factors. If it’s your first time, start off with 50% for the first Leader cycle, if it feels good move up to 55% the following Leader cycle.
For how long you’ll be able to cycle between this protocol, it’s hard to tell, depends on your age, training experience and how you feel during the program. If you’re fairly fresh you can probably run it for a couple cycles with no issues

4

Only you can answer this question. This depends on your goals, schedule, age, training age, recovery ability etc. If you plan on only training for hypertrophy for the rest of your life you probably could, but I imagine at some point any/all of the variables I mentioned will change. And lets be real here, its call BBB for a reason…its f****ing boring. I am running my third straight leader of BBS and I am getting to the point of real burnout with it. When I move on to Jokers and PR sets I will be ecstatic.

Do you mean assistance or supplemental? Assistance is stuff like pullups, dips, dumbbell press, and good mornings. Supplemental would be your BBB sets and reps. I assume you mean supplemental. How many reps are your missing and on what sets? If you are having a hard time on the last couple of reps on your last set, you can probably just grind them out with some focus and determination. If you are missing a few reps on your first few sets you probably need to stop, run 7th Week Protocol: TM Test and make sure your TM is correct.

No.

This is usually explained/defined by what programming you are running. But remember that one of the core principles of the program is to start light. When in doubt just set it to the lowest in the range and build up over time.