Anjali and I started working together about 12 weeks out from competing at this years CNats. So, rather than taking a few blocks to experiment with her programming, we had to rely heavily on past training data to lay out her prep. With Anjali being a full time neuroscience student as well as starting her own business, her life outside of the gym is extremely busy. This led to a few points in prep being a little more rocky than I’m comfortable with, but we were still able to put together a massive performance on the platform and come away from this prep with a ton of valuable data.

One change to Anjali’s training that got made throughout prep was making her tertiary squat day as easy as physically possible. It seemed like having a third squat day was too much given how much fatigue we were building as well as some aches she was having in the quad/glute, but I was not willing to risk making a change as big as taking out an entire squat session that close to meet day. We made it a huge priority to focus on sleep/recovery as well as communicating her fatigue levels to avoid pushing too hard. We were sure to be very deliberate about load selection on each squat day to be sure we weren’t gassing out too early in the block and were able to hit heavy lifts when we needed. We ended up walking away with a 5kg/11lb meet PR with 242, 2 lbs heavier than her gym PR.

Bench definitely went the smoothest out of the 3 this prep. We were able to make some quick progress through technique adjustments, and those technique adjustments seemed to increase her ability to handle workload. Outside of some issues on meet day with bench blocks being unavailable in the warmup room, bench was pretty seamless all through prep.

Deadlift was the only lift we were unable to hit a PR on in the gym this prep. In fact, we attempted 2.5 kg over her ATPR twice in prep, and failed twice. Based on the speed of everything in the 250 lb range, I theorized that there was a pretty significant mental barrier limiting her top end on deadlift. Based on the speed of her third pull, the weight that didn’t budge from the floor twice in prep, I think that’s probably true. Making the switch to 2x per week squatting after the meet will hopefully give us some wiggle room to expose her to heavy weights on deadlift more frequently so we can try to resolve that issue. Overall, I could not be more happy with how this meet went for Anjali. Hit every single lift, hit meet PRs on everything, and we have a much better idea of where to go with training in the future. Very proud of how level-headed Anjali was able to stay throughout this prep despite some circumstances making training very difficult. High hopes for Regionals in July.