Mark Brown
December 7, 2021
This fall’s lifting program was fascinating. I started out working kind in the way that I finished the summer program and ended very differently. The 12 weeks played out in 3 distinct stages: deload, rebuild then the peak. The longer I got into the program, the more I eliminated most of the accessory work. The program began as an extension of the powerbuilding one I had just completed and became much more conjugate at its base than anything else at the end. I learned quite a few lessons from the last 3 months and am writing about the lifting and the learning from them.
If I had posted the logs from my summer program all the way through, one would be able to tell that something was very different in the first 4 weeks. I ended the summer feeling very strong. I raised my 1 rep max in both bench press and deadlift in the test week. I decided to take a week off of doing any lifting after work and get back to work. I knew from previous experience that any length of time taken off from lifting results in a readjustment time when the lifting restarts. What I didn’t think would happen is that I would lose the neural connection I had built up over the prior 10 weeks. That is exactly what happened. All of the lifts took a dip in terms of weight right off the bat. In many ways, it was a 4 week deload while I rebuilt the connection I fine-tuned previously. That was especially true with the cambered bar, which I was squatting with regularly in a program for the first time.
I could feel the strength and power coming back more fully in week 5. Each movement felt more controlled, more powerful. Each week I was making progress in each lift, especially the bench press. In that way, the progress I was making felt natural and made sense. Progress did pick up quite fast those in those weeks. One can see it in training logs as the weights and reps are more consistent week-to-week. Weeks 5-8 were great for the bench press and Romanian deadlift, I just felt like I was getting stronger in the middle working sets. I intentionally stopped sets at 6 reps even though I could feel more than that in them because I knew I would need energy for the heaviest sets. I know I need to start at a higher weight when that I begin to get that feeling. Each week felt progressively stronger and more powerful. The connection was fully rebuilt. Squat was still in a bit of a transition, as I moved from the cambered bar free squat as the main to a Yoke Barr squat. I realized I had kind of forgotten how to free squat with the Yoke Bar and needed to work on it. All three different free squat movements really are different.
Weeks 9 though 12 were something different than I have really felt before lifting. The sessions were more heavy and exhausting than before. I went down from a 5 day schedule of lifting down to 4 days, including a move back to Saturdays for legs at the gym. That shift from 5 days to 4 made getting dedicated shoulder work in harder. From weeks 1-8, the program was chest/triceps/lats on Monday/Thursday, legs/back on Tuesday/Friday and shoulders Wednesday. That schedule became largely untenable starting week 9 because I needed more recovery. The schedule during this peak phase became chest/tris/lats on Monday/Thursday (or Friday) and legs/back on Wednesday/Saturday. That change forced me to think of shoulders very differently. At first, I decided just to mash shoulder stuff onto Thursday’s normal routine but that just made both days suffer. I had to stop looking at log press and viking press as their own lifting entities and more as supplemental lifts. I could feel my chest starting to become overworked so I cut down on dumbbell work that was functioning as the last supplemental lift I did for the night and replaced it with something different.
The last 4 weeks is when I became more acutely aware that my preferred plan of attack is conjugate. I have been following along with Dave Tate’s podcast Table Talk and the videos explaining the nature of conjugate and programming as a whole. The nature of changing lifts as necessary to bring the most out of the lifts they support and bring up weak points is kind of how I was attacking the last 4 weeks of the program. By the end of the 12-week program, I all but ditched accessory lifts was spending all of my time on the main lift and the supplemental lifts. I still see the benefits of all the accessories I took from the sessions but they don’t make sense to do them on the days I was prioritizing bench press, squat and deadlift.
Strengthening the hamstrings was a major point of emphasis this fall. I learned a long time ago that hamstrings were important to overall strength, but that fact was driven home by focusing on the deadlift during the summer. I decided to focus on them through Romanian deadlifts and to get back to the gym for one of the legs days. It’s always been easier to get them in at the gym where isolation machines are more prevalent. It also allowed me access to a leg press. Romanian deadlift as the main supplemental exercise on the first leg/back day of the week set up the rest of it. I could feel the strength I was building up through that deadlift when I went to the gym on Friday or Saturday. Leg curls felt so much more powerful and in control.
I typed out 3 goals before I started this fall program of lifting. They were to put 10 pounds on every bench press, squat and deadlift. I was successful on squat and bench press, but I got sick before I could test the deadlift. I was off for a week or so as a result because I wasn’t really able to hold any food in my system for any appreciable amount of time so eating became secondary. I also experienced some back soreness during the week I was sick, which could be attributed to a lot of things. I’m guessing dehydration was a major factor there. Therefore, The deadlift max attempt has been put off for the time being. I successfully squatted 415 with a straight bar squat and failed at 420 then bench pressed 295 and failed at 305 two days later. Outside of missing the deadlift gym personal record, it went as planned and I was happy I was able to achieve the goals I wanted.
Overall, the 12 weeks showed me a few things that I will be mindful in the future with these extended training programs. First, the initial 4 weeks was mentally painful because it was a physical slow. It was an extended version of the difficulty I feel in giving myself enough time between sets because I just want to get back under the bar. I found that it is a necessary frustration because they function as a deload, especially after four hard weeks of very heavy lifting. The mind-muscle connection is the most important thing to train and that 4 weeks is where it starts. Second, I could feel my strength building week to week, especially after I really started focusing on main and supplemental lifts and all but abandoning accessories. In all of my experiences lifting, I’ve never really felt my body peaking in terms of central nervous connection and physical strength. It was a feeling I’d like to repeat in the future. Third, the last 4 weeks was very instructive, if disorganized. As I felt my body wearing down from the intensity of lifts every single week, I decided to add a third rest day. The result of that was that lifts I had done the previous 8 weren’t being done. Log press, viking press, overhead dumbbell press all lost their place and had to be incorporated in a way that made sense to the overall goals. Fourth, I experienced specialization of lifts much more in this fall than I did in the summer program. It was a different feeling when I got to the garage and could count on one of my hands how many different lifts I was going to do. It’s a very different mindset.
Life Through Lifting 