Sarah Currier

This was Sarah and my second meet through about one year of working together. Within the 8 months between this meet and her last, her total has increased by over 19%. That is an insane number, especially considering the fact that she has been training for several years and body weight is the same. I am super happy with the progress Sarah has made and the work she has put in this prep.

Squat: 122.5kg/270lbs (3/3) 25kg/55lb meet PR

Hands down, the biggest change we made to Sarah’s squat since her last time stepping on the platform was transitioning from high bar to low bar. We learned lots of valuable information about how to program Sarah’s squat over the last 8 months, but a lot of her strength gain during that time can be attributed to simply changing bar position. One thing we’ve found incredibly helpful in her programming has been keeping high reps in on low bar at all times. Sarah was doing 7s on squat on her secondary day 6 blocks straight, right up until 3 days out from meet day. Most of the changes in her microcycle throughout prep were made through manipulating how heavy her primary day exposures were. As far as tapering goes, there wasn’t much change to speak of. We ran her typical 1x5, 2x7 secondary day (Wednesday) and her 1x1, 1x5, 2x5 primary day (Saturday) (accessories staying the same as well) up until 1 week out with her heaviest single of prep being exactly 1 week out. 3 days out from meet day we changed her top set of 5 to a 3x1 w/ ~75%, and kept in 1 set of 7 w/ ~57.5% because we knew keeping in higher rep sets made her primary show up stronger. I’m happy with how her squat peaked for meet day, but there are things that we can experiment with. Such as how we approach loading into taper week, and how much volume we need to keep in on that last session.


Bench: 75kg/165lbs (2/3) 5kg/11lb meet PR

Even with a tough miss at 80kg, most likely had 1kg less on the day, we were able to walk away with a sizable PR. The most impactful change we have made to Sarah’s bench training is the addition of a quaternary day, but the structure of that quaternary day took some time to figure out. We experimented with many things, but what seemed to make Sarah’s primary move the best was having that quaternary session consist of a high number of total sets with low reps, but not enough weight to carry too much fatigue into the subsequent session. The final block of prep that day was a static % based 7x3 w/ 62% of her 1rm, and that was her strongest block of bench to date. One thing that could be improved in her microcycle is making that primary bench land on a Saturday to line up better with potential meet days, but there was no noticeable drop off in strength with this meet landing on her typical secondary session.


Deadlift: 127.5kg/281lbs (3/3) 22.5kg/49.6lb meet PR, 5kg/11lb ATPR

For the longest time, Sarah’s deadlift was her hardest lift to progress. Her leverages favor squat and bench significantly more, so dialing in her position on deads was a challenge. We saw some immediate improvement in her hinging competency by adding in some unilateral/kickstand 111hinging variations w/ contralateral loading, and also saw massive improvements on her starting position with the addition of some lighter % based deadlifts with a 4 second eccentric on her secondary (I believe @prs_performance has a yt video on these). As far as programming goes, we learned quickly that Sarah responds very well to short bouts of pushing deadlift intensity, but cannot sustain it for multiple blocks in a row. Basically, we knew the only way to get her deadlift top end to move was by handling 92.5%+ of her 1rm, but handling 92.5% of her 1rm also beat her into the ground pretty quickly. So, we had to be mindful about when to really load that deadlift day. Although top singles stayed in all throughout the offseason up until meet day, we never took a single to an RPE over 6.5-7 until the final weeks of prep. Though I was a little nervous about not having a good idea of where her top end was through most of prep, we were confident in her past training data that a short burst of intensity over ~1 block should give an immediate increase to her top end. At Sarah’s last meet, she pulled 2.5kg over her failed heaviest pull of prep, and it moved like an opener. There could be several reasons why she was so strong on this day, but since this is the best peaking data we had, we ran essentially the same deadlift taper into this meet. We had basically the same result with the exception not having that missed pull 1 week out. Her final pull of prep was 122.5, and we opened a little on the aggressive side with 115 given the speed of her final pull /our confidence in meet day being our strongest of prep. We matched her ATPR on her second attempt and hit an easy 5kg ATPR for her third with maybe 7.5kg in the tank.


With Sarah weighing on the lighter side of the 67.5kg class (63.2kg), this will most likely be her last meet in the 67.5kg division for the time being. Her 60kg debut is looking like it will occur in late 2023 and, with the way things are going, I expect to hit a total PR despite the decrease in body weight.