In the last couple of months my bench press has gone up to 130lbs, my squat is still around 175 due to not training it specifically enough (I was doing front squats, back squats, you name it I tried it, etc), and my deadlift stalled at 195. Try as I might, I haven’t been able to get 200, even though I’ve pulled 195x5repsx3sets.
What I’ve discovered through all of this experimentation is that low reps work very well on my upper body, while high reps tend to do more for my lower. For example, I noticed the most progress (25lbs in a month) on my bench when I was doing a 4-3-2 wave and the most progress on my lower when I was banging out 5 plus reps per set. What has slowed me down the most has been trying to accomplish a lot with low reps on my lower body. It’s just not having it.
Right now I’m mainly interested in upping my deadlift and squat. I feel that my bench has made great progress from where I started, and it’s time to make the other lifts catch up.
For a while I was posting a training log over in the main training log area. There I observed a TON of 5-3-1 training logs. After reading Jim Wendler’s articles on this site, I went out and bought his ebook: 5-3-1 The Simplest and Most Effective Training program. If you really want to understand all of the numbers behind this training journal and learn some useful ideas for your own program, I recommend buying that ebook from elitefit.com.
The reason why I decided to post this journal here is that I’m interested in how this program will work on a woman. As I mentioned above, I’ve already found that different rep schemes are better on different body parts. I’ve had several other women try lower reps on their upper body after getting stuck, and they also found that it worked better than 5 reps.
So how will this much more complicated program work? Will my lower body notice more improvement than my upper because the reps are higher?
Today I’m heading down to the gym for the first day of the program, which is going to be deadlifts.
Here’s what I’ll be doing:
Deadlift: 120x5, 135x5, 155x5 or as many as I can get. Here’s the trick to the program- on the last set you just keep going and try to set a new rep pr for that weight. I’ll keep you posted as to what happens.
In addition, I’m going to start training with certain crossfit workouts three or four days a week. I haven’t picked which ones yet, but the idea is that they will compliment whatever I did that day without wearing out a different body part for the next day.
