I was planning to rotate the main lifts like below, as was suggested previously in the thread. And then carefully add a little bit of assistance work every workout.
Monday
Deadlift - Power: Conventional
Squat - Strength: Low-bar squat
Bench - Hypertrophy: Overhead press
Assistance: Ab-wheel + back extensions
Wednesday
Bench - Power: Bench press
Deadlift - Strength: Conventional
Squat - Hypertrophy: Front squats
Assistance: Pull-ups
Friday
Squat - Power: Low-bar squat
Bench - Strength: Bench press
Deadlift - Hypertrophy: Pendlay rows
Assistance: Leg-curls
I’m not sure if I managed to communicate it clearly in the last post, but as you see I’ve replaced each of the lifts for the hypertrophy work with another relevant lift. My motivation for doing this is different for each of the lifts.
Squats: I believe that my quads are a weak, hence I though I could use front squats instead to give them some extra attention.
Bench press: The program I’m completing now is the first time I’ve had a bench frequency of 2, before it’s been 1 or 1.5 per week (1 and 2 every other week). As I seem to be progressing fine for now with this frequency for bench and my shoulders are happy every time I overhead press, I though that these things combined made good reasons for doing overhead press for volume bench.
Deadlifts: The amount of deadlifts I’m doing now and even more so in the coming program is the highest deadlift volume I’ve ever done. The volume has felt really nice the last 12 weeks, greasing the groove as they say, but it also seems to give me enough stimulus for now. Hence, I thought that there is no reason to up the frequency. I’ve yet to find a movement that targets my upper back as well as pendlay rows and in addition I find them to be good training for staying tight in the starting position of my deadlifts. For these reasons I though I could use these rows for my deadlift volume.
Does these choices make sense? And is my idea of not changing things too much at any point a good standard to have as long as things are moving forward? Are you still in the opinion that I should replace the Pendlay rows? Or did you believe that I was planning to do them in addition to doing deadlifts 3 times a week?
When you say that I should always include some lat, upper back and ab/low back work, you mean that I should hit each of these once with some pump work during the week right? I can for instance super set the pull-ups with close grip push ups to get a full arm workout. And of course I’ll treat the assistance as assistance work, skiping them if I feel low on energy or having other issues. It is the main movements that are the fun part anyway… I should maybe also mention that I’ve started to do band pull-apparts or band face-pulls in between the sets of either squats or bench. This feels really good and I hope that it will aid in keeping my shoulders healthy.
I always log my trainings in my training diary. And I’ll probably test after every cycle for now to verify that I’m getting progress, but I’ll keep in mind that I should eventually also end some of my cycles in a 2 or 3RM.
I cannot express how valuable your help has been for me!