Bella and I started working together at the start of her prep into Northeast Regionals with her last meet being about 6 months prior. Given our limited time working into this meet, we didn’t have much room to troubleshoot and try different things, but we were able to see some pretty rapid progress through transitioning into a different training system. We learned a lot about Bella’s response to training through this prep and have some great data to use going forward.

We quite literally were not able to keep up with Bella’s squat progress through prep. Although her workload across the week was relatively conservative (6 total sets per week excluding her primary days top single), it was a sizable increase from her 1x per week frequency (typically non-comp) before starting with me. We placed hard caps on all squat sets to avoid loading weights that her body has not yet adapted to, even if they are weights she could move at the prescribed RPE, and loosened the reins as we got closer to meet day. We finished prep with a 135kg/297lb squat, which added 10kg to the PR she hit the week prior. Although we saw massive progress in Bella’s squat strength, that workload ended up killing her ability to come into her deadlift sessions feeling strong. Moving forward, we will be putting more of a cap on her squat loads to slow progress down a little, and in turn shift some of that workload onto deadlifts where we know she needs more stress.

Bella’s bench has an insane amount of room to grow. Similar to squat, we stuck with a very conservative workload of 2x per week. I’m confident we’ll find that a higher frequency approach will be necessary once she hits a wall, but there was simply no need to add any more work due to her pressing workload being so low before, and her competition workload being essentially zero. Despite the massive progress that we made on bench, I honestly can’t say that we learned too much. We just made adjustments from her prior programming that made sense on paper, and ran the same thing through the entire meet prep with no real hiccups along the way.

Deadlift was the one lift that we were unsure whether or not a PR would be there by meet day. But, that wasn’t much of a concern given the fact that our main goal was qualifying for nationals, and that was done by openers. As I stated earlier, Bella’s progress on squats had a significant impact on her deadlift performance through prep. She would consistently come into her deadlift sessions feeling beat up, and performance consistently trended downwards as we got closer to meet day and as squat loads increased. We ran a slightly more aggressive taper on squats, her only squat work on the week of the meet was a 3x1 with <75% of her 1rm 5 days out, and then kept deadlifts in closer to meet day with her last session being only 3 days out. This allowed us to reduce fatigue from the source we knew it was actually coming from while keeping skill practice as high as possible on deadlifts. This actually worked as well as we could’ve hoped. Bella pulled 300lbs two weeks out at a true RPE10, and pulled 319lbs on the platform with ~5kg in the tank. All in all, Bella’s deadlift has a much higher ceiling than what we saw through this prep, and we know exactly how to go about getting that top need to show.