[quote]DaveForner wrote:
Glad to help.
BPA is indeed band pull apart.
As for gear programming, I’m not entirely sure. I think this is more where following the programs directly becomes fairly convoluted. I know Adam Ramzy has experience with this (very successfully, I might add), so hopefully he’ll chime in.
I’ve been thinking about it recently, actually. If I were to do it, I’d likely have one of the days be in my suit, one in the shirt, deadlift day always do some sets in suit. I’d almost like to say that you should just go full gear, and if you can’t hit depth until your top sets, that’s okay. Same with bench, if you can’t touch, that’s fine. It will really take knowing your lifts very well to do this, I would imagine. Anyway, that’s just rambling, I really can’t answer this just yet – I’ve only trained raw.[/quote]
Many thanks for this kind words.
As far as programming in single ply gear, it depends on the lift… For squat it is very simple and worked amazing for me (went from a 245-300kg single ply squat in under 1 year). I’m still working on the bench. For deadlift, also very simple.
Squat:
IMO lots of straps down with the squat suit is key. My most common programming is:
Monday AM: straps down squats
Monday PM: belt/wrap
Friday: varies… if 2 sessions I often enjoy doing the 2nd beltless and the first is either belt/wrap or suit bottoms.
To start I would say just one session a week in the suit. If the competition is more that 16 weeks away, once per week is good. Once you get close to the meet I would often ditch the monday PM squat and do 1 straps up session on Monday and 1 straps down session on Friday. Remember, in the suit YEAR ROUND - you are good at what you practise.
The frank truth, is that you program them in just how you would without the suit BUT you need to be conservative. When I train with just a belt my squat might be 415 5x3… With the suit I will need to do say 555 5x3… That is a HUGE difference in weight!!! The 555 will move very fast but I will feel sooo tired at the end. When I try to make the sets feel a comparable RPE to my raw training, I will always feel awful for a week.
Now bench… Well the bench is my nightmare (did 230kg no problem in training but bombed with 215kg at jr worlds…) ANYWAYS… What I have heard from Dunn is that the russian team will put on a shirt once per week that will be 1 size loose and they will do regular 80% 5x3 (a friend of his with a 300kg bench does 240kg 5x3 regularily) AND add in 3 sets of board work with near competition max weights (maybe 280kg 3x2 off a 2bd). For me in the past, I never had regular training partners and time to really do that so I just put the competition shirt on once every week or 2 for 10 weeks and just practised getting the bar to touch.
For deadlift… Well you really only need to put on the suit twice before a meet IMO… 8 weeks out and 4 weeks out and it ought to be sufficient… Again, the 8 week out session may be a skills evaluation (or 4 weeks out depending on how you do it… ‘sheiko’ programs suggest 4 weeks out, I almsot prefer no true skills evaluation but more so just doing some <95% singles for a change).
That reminds me… When to put on the suit/shirt? Definitely not before 70% but this is what I found worked great. % are calculated based on max with that particular set of gear on.
Squat warmup:
50% x5
*belt
60% x4
*wrap
70% x3
*suit bottoms
70% x3
80% 5x3
I personally often add in a second belt/wrap warmup:
Something like this worked for me before nationals 2012:
235 x5
*belt
295 x4
*Wraps
375 x3
435 x3
*bottoms
505 x3
555 5x3
This is the general scheme I did leading up to nationals.
Once I got to be 8 weeks out I added in more higher intensity weights but I feel like that was a mistake often. Live and learn.
Anyways, this post is long enough ahhaha. LMK if you have more questions.