How do you progress while on the bear given that the first set is always 5reps of 6or 7 rm?? Thnaks for any input.
You progress by increasing the weight. I use a wave progression, increasing for 4 workouts, then drop the weight 2/3 notches and repeat. Effectively peak every 4 workouts with a major peak after 12 weeks.
I currently alternalte the bear with ABBH, which seems to be working fairly well.
[quote]De Molay wrote:
You progress by increasing the weight. I use a wave progression, increasing for 4 workouts, then drop the weight 2/3 notches and repeat. Effectively peak every 4 workouts with a major peak after 12 weeks.
[/quote]
Yep, and first time around start ligher - use 10% less then your 6-7RM and “work-up” to it in two weeks or so. Also, you should try to increse your first (heavy) set, but it’s not needed to increase backdown 5x5 that much since they “work” through volume and incomplete rest periods. In other words, if you did 100kgx5 as your top set and then followed it by 90kgx5, and 80kgx5x5, it makes sense to try 102.5kgx5 next week, but you can keep doing 80x5x5 for a while.
The bear is a great GPP exercise, but its component parts are much better for pure explosive power. This illustrates the process for raising performance - strengthen the component parts of the exercise on power strength days and wave the weight as previously noted on GPP or BBing days. I hope this helps.