Brendan and I have been working with each other for a decent chunk of time at this point, will be 2 years in April. So, we have a good amount of training data stacked up and a system that we know works pretty well. Coming off a 30kg meet PR in July, the goal was to just take a step back and build into Collegiate Nationals this coming April, but this state level Collegiate meet popped up and we figured it would be a good opportunity to experiment with some different things regarding block length and tapering, and for Brendan to score some points for his team.

 As far as regular training goes, the biggest change we made to Brendan’s squat was making the switch from heels to flats. In terms of set up and execution, Brendan’s main issue was biasing too heavily into his heels, and just not getting enough extension overall in his unrack/walkout. Historically, Brendan has had issues with depth, so making a switch to flats may seem counter-intuitive, but the depth issues stemmed for center-of-mass management to begin with, so taking away the heel elevation and gaining more access to his forefoot actually helped with reaching depth more consistently throughout this prep. As far as programming goes, Brendan’s sets x reps were nearly identical as his prep into Northeast Regionals in July; Primary (Monday): top set of 1 (kept primary single for whole 3 block macro-cycle instead of our typical 3-2-1 progression) followed by a second top set of 3, and 3 back-down sets of 5. The secondary (Thursday) consisted of a single top set of 4-5 followed by 3 back-down sets of 5. But, one change that isn’t reflected through sets x reps there is the fact that we transitioned into entirely low bar on that secondary session, when before it was entirely high bar. We started by just giving a low bar top set, and then fed in the backdown work later in prep. When it comes to block length, we shifted toward 3 week blocks during the final stretch of prep, and the final block was a 3 week + 1 week taper. I would say this almost definitely worked better than our 4+1 from July. Although we did not match Brendan’s best squat from this prep on the platform (which we did at Regionals) we certainly could have, and it would most likely have been easier. Brendan’s best squat from training was 205kg/451lbs and was the hardest squat I have ever seen Brendan do, and we were able to secure 202.5kg/446lbs on the platform with 2.5kg-5kg in the tank. I think the shorter block length + shifting his secondary squat placement one day back are two big pieces of data we can take into our approach into our Nationals taper. As far as microcycle design goes, not much to change there for the time being.

Bench is Brendan’s most advanced lift, but is simultaneously the trickiest to progress. Judging bar speed alone, it looks like there was about 5kg+ left in the tank, but in reality, it was more like 0 kg-2.5kg. The bottleneck in Brendan’s bench training is certainly upper body muscle mass. Although Brendan is pretty jacked for a 75kg lifter, we are definitely at a point where the “technique slider” on his bench is near maxed out, and we need more bulk up top to actually move the weight. The main inconsistency through this prep was technique holding up with 95%+ of 1rm. Since this weight range wouldn’t necessarily induce too much fatigue, we were able to get it in his hands multiple times per block to try and increase competency with heavier weights. Brendan’s average intensity on his primary/secondary sessions were very high with around an average of RPE 8 as his week 1 entry point on singles. Although we were able to be exposed to heavy weights frequently throughout a meso-cycle, most of Brendans backdown/rep-work was very light-weight/high-rep. 100% of his work was in the 5-8 rep range apart from his 2 weekly singles, so in the final block of prep we shifted his tertiary session from a 3x8 to a 2x3 followed by a 2x8 to give a him a bit more exposure to that lower rep range that his program did not have. It didn’t move the needle. Whether or not that was due to a lack of time (only 3 weeks with this layout), or the possibility that it simply did not work, does not change the fact that we need to place a higher priority on longer range of motion pec hypertrophy work in his offseason. Post-meet, we are starting to experiment with a three day per week bench split, which we have never done (only 4x or 5x prior), with a “quaternary” session consisting of only dumbbell press. Although I doubt three times per week benching will be enough exposure to maintain/progress top end in the long term, we know that shifting back into a higher frequency schedule will be very easy given all the data we have on Brendan’s bench training.

I would say deadlift is the lift we were able to learn the most about this prep, both on his tapering process as well as general year-round training. Deadlift had stalled for a long time prior to his last meet, over one year without beating his previous max, simply from an inability to handle workload, but once we worked up to a point where we were able to place some meaningful work in on a secondary session, we saw his primary start to show up big time. We saw lots of progress going into regionals with keeping reps in the 6-7 range on the secondary with a slight push in intensity on the first set (10kg meet PR on the platform), so we ran with that same layout in hopes of keeping that momentum going. The change we did make to his microcycle was adding in a second top set on his Saturday primary (1x4) after his single as a way to feed into the intensity that we knew he was responding well to. Though we did make some marginal progress on top end through the 16 weeks between these two meets (2.5kg difference on the platform), I can confidently say that set would be more productive as a stand-alone top set earlier in the week on his secondary day. Similar to squat, we kept a primary day top single in the program all throughout prep instead of our typical 3-2-1 progression. We ended up finishing prep on a 232.5kg fail. It’s important to note that this was the same week as his 205 squat @10, and he was under more fatigue than *probably* ever given the loads we were handling leading up to it. Despite the fail in training, it was still the plan to take 232.5 on the platform to truly test how the 3+1 taper worked relative to our typical 4+1. Since we were definitively able to show up stronger on the platform than what we were able to do in training, we will be mimicking this same taper strategy going into Nationals this coming April. Coming out of this meet, we are experimenting with a harder push on the secondary session by transferring that high intensity 1x4 over to Tuesday, and seeing how an 85-90% exposure affects his primary, which we have not done before. All in all, this prep was extremely productive and provided lots of meaningful data for our push into Nationals where we hope to finally break through that 600kg+ barrier on the total.