In January of this year, Brendan competed with the hopes of qualifying for 2023 Collegiate Nationals in the 75kg class. We fell short of the 555kg total by 12.5kg on a missed third deadlift. The goal going into this prep was to not only qualify for next year's nationals, but make it undeniable. Before going into the details of prep I want to note how motivated and committed Brendan was after his meet in January. He immediately put his head down and got to work to put himself in the best position possible to put together something special at Regionals. So, hats off to Brendan.

His squat microcycle changed very little from last prep to now given how well he was progressing into his last competition, but one thing we knew needed fixing was his ability to maintain tension in the bottom third of the movement. His missed third attempt in January was simply due to losing tension in the hole and not being able to recover his position loss enough to stand up with the weight. Simply adding in a paused squat top set in place of his typical competition top set on his primary day forced him to manage center of mass a little better with heavier loads. Although the pause was only added to his top set, it had an immediate effect on how he approached and executed his backdown sets as well. This was an extremely simple intervention but had massive effects on rep quality all across prep, and squat progress just compounded. The paused top sets stayed in until about ~12 weeks out, but we kept the pauses in on all warmup sets to reinforce positioning as much as possible. His secondary day stayed the same pretty much all through prep with a high bar top set of 5 at an increasing RPE throughout the block (6-7.5) and 3 % based high bar back down sets of 5. The primary day’s top sets on his last 3 (4 week) blocks of prep tapered down from a triple to a single, and we finished prep on a PR 200kg/441 squat that we were able to match on the platform.

Bench is the lift that Brendan is best leveraged for, but also the lift we had the least success with this prep. Brendan has an extremely short range of motion, and his press is heavily reliant on technique being on point. The goal of this prep was to make bench as reliable and predictable as possible, and knowing that Brendan could probably handle as much bench as we threw at him, we figured adding in a low intensity, low rep % based quinary bench session would be a good entry point into increasing exposure/skill practice. Frankly, it had no effect on how his bench moved. We knew the microcycle we had worked well enough to keep his bench stagnant at worst, and given how well the other two lifts were going we decided that was better than making a change too close to meet day and having it screw things up. The plan for meet day was to match his competition PR with 140kg and then qualify for CNats on his second pull. His second bench pretty much guaranteed that he had more than planned on the day, and we knew if we loaded the extra 2.5kg we would be able to comfortably pull the QT on his first deadlift by bumping his already conservative opener up by 5kg, and then we could just have some fun on his last two pulls. I felt more comfortable making this call because a.) He had pressed 147.5kg in the gym, and b.) A missed third bench would have no impact on his ability to qualify by his second deadlift. Judging by how his third bench moved, he had even more in the tank.

Brendan hit his first gym PR with 222.5kg in over a year during this prep. We simply could not figure out how to get his pulls moving. We knew he needed 2x per week pulls to progress, but we also knew that whenever a secondary day was brought in there would be aches and pains popping up in a few weeks, and that second day would always do more harm than good. After his meet in January, we decided on a very low RPE, higher rep deadlift set on a secondary day 3 days prior to his primary was a mild enough entry point to having a second session that even if it didn't budge his top end, it would at least give him an opportunity to adapt to a slightly higher workload. Surprisingly, that 1x6 was all we needed to give his deadlift the nudge that we were never really able to get. Across the six months between meets we slowly increased the demand on that secondary session and we landed on a 1x6 in the 6RPE range, followed by a backdown 1x6 with a 7.5% drop from the top set. We were able to hit a 2.5kg ATPR deadlift single at the end of each of the last 4 blocks leading up to meet day after a 12 block span of no PR’s.

Last thing I think is worth mentioning is the success of Brendan’s weight cut (despite slightly overdoing it). His training weight at the start of meet prep was nearing 80kg, and through very slow calorie cutting into the meet day, and a standard gut cut protocol 3 days out, Brendan was able to comfortably make weight with literally zero loss in strength.