Alan and I have been working together for about 1.5 years now, but this is only our second meet together. Alan’s last time stepping on the platform was in October of 2022 and, quite frankly, he is a completely different lifter at this point. Not just in terms of strength, but his technique, mindset, and composure on the platform have all come a long way this past year of training. We came in with the goal of breaking the 700kg total barrier for the first time, but fell 7.5kg short due to a narrow miss on his third attempt squat. Despite missing the third squat, I am confident he had 705+ on the day with how strong his bench and deadlift showed up, we just need to know exactly what to expect from his taper. The past 6 months of training have been incredibly productive for Alan and we took a lot of valuable data from this prep/taper that will be extremely useful moving forward.

Despite lots of troubleshooting in the arrangement of Alan’s micro cycle, the overall structure of his week of squatting has been consistent for a long time. We added in SSB squats on his secondary squat session back in August of 2022 to target some positional issues at the ribcage, and that has stayed in the program long after those problems were solved. Alan is extremely sensitive to specificity, and generates disproportionately high amounts of fatigue the more we load the competition movements, specifically squat and deadlift. So, we have to be extremely deliberate about where we allocate that stress and how often we push low bar squatting. There was also consistent low back pain that came with too much low bar work/keeping average intensity too high in general. Simply put, Alan can not handle 2x per week low bar, so that SSB session served as a way to get some general squat pattern work in early on in the week as to not detrain, but also not push past what was necessary. Alan thrives in the low rep ranges, so that Tuesday secondary session consisted of a 1x3 that remains relatively static in the RPE 6-6.5 range, this would be taken in the 70 to 74% range of his one rep max. Following the 1x3, he would have 3 sets of 4 also remaining relatively static in the RPE 6-6.5 range, these would be taken in the 60 to 64% range of his one rep max. For his primary day, we ran singles all through the off-season into prep. Since Alan generates fatigue so easily, we really couldn’t push his top end for more than 1-2 consecutive weeks regardless of rep range, so we found that really undershooting the front half of the block, and then take something in the RPE 7 range on week 3 consistently made his week 4 show up strong. So in reality, he only had 1 hard set on squats per block, so cycling out of singles to reduce fatigue build up was not necessary. His strength on weeks 1-3 was always extremely low, but we could always rely on week 4 showing up how we needed to, so we were confident that if we timed things properly tapering into meet day should be easy. We’ll get into the taper towards the end, but come meet day I can say that strength was at best consistent with his best training day. Alan took 247.5kg TWICE on his last heavy squat session of prep. Failed his first attempt, got it at a true RPE 10 on his second attempt. The planned third attempt going into meet day was 245, we kept 247.5 as the high end third. Based on Alan’s ability to grind on squat along with the speed of his second attempt, I felt that 247.5 was there on the day, but it just wasn’t. That attempt should have been played more safe by me as we did not need those extra 2.5kg to hit the 700 as long as we hit our planned numbers for bench and deadlift. Altogether, Alan’s squat showed up strong on the day, and we were happy to grab a 17.5kg meet PR on a second attempt.

For the majority of our time working together Alan has been benching three times per week. We know he responds well to relatively low intensity work in the low to moderate rep range, all of his reps coming from sets of 3-6, and specifically placing the lower rep work 2 days before his primary with one day of rest after. We ran a typical RPE progression scheme for his Saturday’s primary day top single of 6-7-8-9, and were able to consistently chip away at his PR bench by 2.5kg each block from about 175kg to 185kg. We hit a wall as soon as we broke into the low 400s and couldn’t sustain that 2.5kg per block progression. Instead of adding more intensity to any of his sessions, we decided on adding a quaternary session of larsen press early in the week with a prescribed load of 120/264 for 2x5. We went in the direction of increased frequency because we knew he could handle the work, just not the increased load on the bar, and he wouldn’t have been able to sustain more than 4 productive sets per session so an additional exposure was necessary. This immediately gave Alan the boost he needed and we were immediately able to break through deeper into the 400s. We did experiment with having a low intensity single earlier in the week in the 150-155kg range, and his primary immediately showed up worse. We are pretty confident that he can really only handle the one high intensity session per week. We had a similar experience on meet day to his last time in the platform where bench showed up significantly stronger than any training session. Alan hit 190/418 a grand total of two times this prep (and ever), both at absolute RPE 10, and only one to competition standard. Meet day comes, and he presses the same weight with 5 to 7.5 in the tank. I’d love to attribute it to a well written taper, but since we didn’t taper bench I have to assume that Alan just gets a big boost from the meet day adrenaline. Regardless, bench showed up better than expected and we were able to go 3/3 with room to spare.

Deadlift followed a similar trend to squat in terms of average intensity throughout the block and how we ramped intensity, but surprisingly there was little to no overlap in the fatigue they generated. Despite his high sensitivity to specificity, we were able to load and progress top end on squats and deadlifts simultaneously without detriment. We found a plan for deadlift that worked early on, so there wasn’t much tinkering with how his micro cycle is laid out, most of the experimenting was in technique/set up. The less frequently you’re able to perform a movement, the harder it is to hone your technique. This was absolutely the case with deadlifts for Alan. At one point we tried adding in a secondary deadlift day consisting of a couple sets of stiff legged deadlifts with around 50% of his one rep max, and it was completely unmanageable. His primary immediately showed up weaker and he needed a deaload by the end of week 4. So, without the ability to have a low stress secondary for skill practice, we needed to find a way to sneak some hinge work in there and just hone technique through cueing and intent. The main things that helped us in terms of pulling more efficiently were A.) spending less time at the bar, and B.) emphasizing forefoot pressure with a toes elevated DB RDL warmup before deadlifts. Alan tends to be an extremely mental lifter when the weight gets heavy, so putting literal time constraints on how long he is allowed to set up for helped with psyching himself out too much in his set up. As far as the toes elevated RDLs go, Alan tended to be very heel-heavy and “squatty” with his pull, which led to issues at lockout that caused red lights on his third pull at his last meet. The technique improvements we were able to make only added to his already dialed in micro/meso, and we were able to see massive progress in not only his strength, but also how predictable his top end would be. Meet day strength showed up better than expected, we were definitely able to exceed his strongest day in the gym. We were planning to open with 232.5 and take a 20kg jump into his second to keep things consistent with his training, but ended up bumping his opener to 237.5kg at the last minute simply to push him later in the lineup. Things moved a bit faster than expected and I decided it would be better to open slightly heavier and have warmup times be consistent with training. Everything else in the day went smooth, and we ended up matching his best pull in training with 2.5-5 in the tank.

As far as the taper goes, I was bit unsure how it was going to go if I’m being honest. We ended Alan’s “offseason” with a very heavy RPE 9-10 week on all 3 lifts, and followed up with a deload into meet prep. The deload was there to A.) reduce fatigue from the heavy week of training, and B.) Help time his taper better so we could run a typical 4 week block followed by a 1 week taper week into meet day. But, the block following that deload was the worst performing, least productive block of training we had all year. I can’t 100% guarantee what caused the poor performance, but we never ever deload in his training, and as soon as we added that new variable we saw an immediate drop in performance. The way we structured his deload was by keeping everything the same, but just completely removing the high intensity sets that beat him up so much. So I had to go into his taper with the understanding that, although we know high intensity beats him up easily, he will also detrain very easily when that intensity is taken away completely. This led to a taper week that basically looked like a typical week 1 for Alan in terms of top set intensity with aggressively cut backdown work on squat and deadlift, we left his last squat session as SSB. Bench stayed essentially the same all the way till meet day. Despite the uncertainty, I could not be happier with how Alan peaked. We were able to match or exceed his best strength in the gym, we just weren’t able to let it show through on squat. I am incredibly proud of the work that Alan has put in and the progress he has made this past year. He has a very high ceiling in this sport, I’m happy we’re starting to see things take shape.