Jordan Feigenbaum MD SSC: The Texas Method and 5/3/1.

[Manimal]

This thread, more than the article, details how complicated and controversial intermediate programming can be. If anything it points out the simplistic and definitive beauty of SSLP. Jordan's article is an awesome first attempt at actually trying to quantify what an intermediate needs to progress. Both programs successfully outline a few obvious things that an intermediate needs to focus on. The lifter needs volume but less frequently than a novice, they need to move heavy shit that they cant do more than 5-7 of at a time pretty often as well, and never underestimate the value of a recovery workout. Beyond those the choice boils down the knowledge of your own recovery. I agree that RPE shouldn't be a foundation of a program, I have 3 measures for RPE, I can get 1 more, maybe I can get 1 more, and I cant get 1 more. RPE does allow a lifter to adjust for a potential shitty recovery. Most of us will never move past intermediate phase, yet hopefully most of us will keep lifting healthily for a long time. I have issues with TM because the program requires me to be maximally recovered from work out to workout. The program might be the most unforgiving intermediate program available. A weekend vacation or bad nutrition leads to a bad volume day then to missed intensities, or accumulated fatigue that ends in some shitty plateau. On the other hand, 5/3/1 is too damn slow. Going from progressing 3 days a week to once every 4 months is ridiculous. No fresh intermediate is humble enough to accept that they can add 100lbs to the squat in 2 years time after adding several hundred in a few months. So I get the option of 8 weeks of seriously humbling progress or make the same progress in 1.5 years. There has to be a more reasonable program than choosing either extreme.

[Mark Rippetoe]

There is. See page 145 of PPST3.

[marcf]

This has all been so fucking confusing. 5/3/1 is fucking confusing. First set last. BBB. Joker sets. Accessories this and accessories that. It sounds like a mess of a free for all. And from what I remember with the original 5/3/1, before I became familiar with the concept of SRA, I knew instinctively that there was no way I could make progress on doing the main lifts for just a week for hardly any volume.

5/3/1 in its current state sounds like a rough draft that got put through a bunch of edits because the original sucked, but was never truly rewritten after those edits into something cohesive. It sounds like a big mess.

I believe Wendler is WRONG when he says, "Over the past 20-plus years, the following principles have stood the test of time, and I believe they can make any program successful: Start too light; Progress Slow."

No.

[z3nrunn3r]

If you see buddah on the side of the road, kill it!

[Bryan Dobson]

I often wonder what people who train alone, like myself, find themselves doing when a set turns into a complete bitch somewhere in the middle and they actually lose count of whether that last rep was rep 4 or rep 5? I tend to give myself the 5 on all but the last sets where I'll grind out another for good measure, if I can, but I wonder overall both what others do, and more importantly, of how much consequence it is.

I have the set on video..I review the set and recount to make sure. if you can't hold yourself accountable, who can you trust?

[Cmmm]

This thread is just silly. Consider that the 5/3/1 was originally put together to stop this kind of discussion. Wendler was just tired of thinking training after he finished with his PL career and needed just something simple as possible to train strength slowly. So it was not meant to be the best program out there (which itself is an absurd claim - to any program). You can discuss things like frequency, volume etc. to the end of days, but empirical evidence I've seen done with 5/3/1 is just too strong to ignore the programs worth.

And why wouldnt it work? All the principles are there. If you look only the vital aspects the TM and 5/3/1 are basically pretty much the same.

Anyway, I also admit that the 5/3/1. OG was not "complete", the Beyond tried to fix this, but had too many loose ends and decisions to make for younger lifters. The newest book puts this all together, and I believe (biased or not), that it will be one of the best training books around there and also the best book Wendler has put out.

[George Christiansen]

I have the set on video..I review the set and recount to make sure.

I realize that a lot of people video themselves lifting. I might start to do this as well. I wasn't really posing it as a problem so much as to raise the question of how much it really matters in driving overall progress, which is tied (I think) to the idea of RPE evaluation only having to be pretty good, rather than spot on.

if you can't hold yourself accountable, who can you trust?

It would seem that most people cannot hold themselves accountable really. This is a big reason that coaches/trainers have clients.

I'm a pretty self-motivated/dependent guy when it comes to my goals, mostly by necessity, rather than choice. I am currently working on a couple of different things that really have no outside pressures or encouragement to rely on, but I still find myself telling just enough people to encourage a bit of shame should I quit or fail. Most people seem to nee a lot more outside accountability than that.

[Manimal]

There is. See page 145 of PPST3.

I dont have a copy of the book with me, but I'm guessing this points to the HLM section. If HLM is the best choice because it's moderate choice, then what is the goal of analyzing the extremes besides reinforcing that they are extremes?

[deeprooted]

Eh, that might be okay but neither template advocates for that and still frequency is compromised. So, overall- my assessment stands IMO.

I agree but doubling up the frequency at least is something. And to be fair the frequencies in the 4-day TM split would be the same, no?

I would agree re: Paleo (and have said the same thing) but 4 day TM has no light day. By your own definition, this is no longer TM.

Yup... that's why I said things would get murky when deciding whether the 4-day split is still TM. One could argue the light day is the least important of them but as I said: it's getting murky here. Personally I'd rather call it a TM-derived 4-day split. So I'm with you on that but my point still stands when as I said TM in PP anticipates 5x5 only to work for a limited amount of time and makes suggestions on how to proceed and that this doesn't change anything of the original template other than the rep schemes.

This is an incorrect analysis IMO. Light day disrupts homeostasis during that point of recovery, which is the only way it can do anything.

OK I'm not smart enough to counter that since I'm just regurgitating what's in PP anyway, so your point stands.

No they do not, in my opinion.

So you're saying the type of stress/goal for instance in TM VD and ID are not different? I mean I understand that it comes down to accumulated stress but I can't imagine 5x5 and a 5RM to be the same type of stress.

Hypertrophy can occur independently of strength increase and vice versa after initial training exposures, though this is complex.

Sure I agree you can just do a bunch of volume and get a "pump" just as well as you can improve your neuromuscular efficiency and thus increase your strength without even gaining any mass. What I've tried to point out specifically though is where you said that from a hypertrophy standpoint, stresses are not accumulated over a long time, while from a strength standpoint they do in late intermediates or advanced lifters. If this strength increase is not purely neuromuscular but involves growth of the muscular cross-section then I would argue that even from a hypertrophy standpoint stresses can be accumulated over multiple workouts. Unless you're talking specifically from a "sarcoplasmic hypertrophy" standpoint, which you then might be right about as again I'm not smart enough to argue here since I don't think this has been covered in PP or articles around here.

I'm not sure what you're saying I did not compare wrt strength.

You've said previously that if the soreness resulting from the training is so great that it limits subsequent training intensity and volume then the intraworkout stresses (of a single session) is too great. Yet as I've just explained (Note: this explanation has been cut out in your quotation of my post) according to PP this is exactly what is happening in the TM and the other programs targeted towards intermediate and advanced trainees because of the longer stress/recovery/adaptation cycles as depicted in the respective graphs in the book. You do not consider/compare those s/r/a cycles in the article and since SSLP has a 48h s/r/a cycle, TM a 7 day s/r/a cycle and 531 a 4 week (altough one could indeed argue about the latter) I don't see this working out correctly.

I disagree. SRA applies to all, so not sure what your argument is.

As said above... of course it applies to all but since all 3 programs are targeted at lifters of different stages of progress they all have different s/r/a cycle lengths. Which is the reason why I think comparing accumulated volumes and tonnages over 1 or 2 weeks doesn't work for programs that have different s/r/a cycles. Maybe you could indeed compare SSLP to StrongLifts (although what would be the point? lol) or the TM to HLM and the 4-day TM split or 531 to another 4 week advanced program but not all of them with each other.

That's an interesting point, but since I disagree with the utility of 5/3/1 as an advanced program (laughable IMO), it would be an even worse analysis for 5/3/1 in that regard. Weekly tonnage and volume need to increase (in general) from SSLP or similar when moving up the ranks as a lifter, which is why I compared it to TM and 5/3/1 in this way.

Well if you think about it:

Week 1 is 3x5+,
Week 2 is 3x3+,
Week 3 is working up to a set of 1+
Week 4 is a deload.
...next cycle you increase the weights.

This looks kinda similar to the cycle of stressors in the TM which has a volume day, then towards the end of the weekly cycle you reduce the volume and increase the intensity and then you have the weekend to recover and increase the weights the following week. So irrelevant whether you think 531 is adequate or not, from the obvious s/r/a cycle and monthly increase in weights this is clearly a program for an advanced lifter and inefficient for an intermediate who has shorter s/r/a cycles and could increase his weights on a weekly basis.

But once again this wasn't really my point in the first place... it is that I question the usefulness of comparing programs on a (bi-)weekly tonnage and volume basis when they have different s/r/a cycles and workouts with different stressors. For instance if you think that a lifter coming to TM from SSLP needs to increase his weekly tonnage/volume/etc. you could simply replace the 5RMs/3RMs/1RMs etc. on ID with another multi-set workout. According to the comparison on tonnages and volumes this would probably fare better in your article (apart maybe for the squat which would be excessive). But it misses the point of the intensity day having it's own type of stress onto the lifter, which to be fair I believe you dismissed above as not being the case anyway. Which just from a PP point of view I still don't get.

[deeprooted]

Please explain how one can have only sarcoplasmic or only myofibrillar hypertrophy. Again, I was very precise in my explanation there. If I had more space to write I could've gone on for pages there.

You can't. I never said you can. PP doesn't say that either. PP says something along the lines of myofibrillar hypertrophy increasing mostly by low rep work and sarcoplasmic hypertrophy increasing mostly by high-rep work. There's this graph with the repetition spectrum and different adaptations. This all makes sense since the adaptation of low rep work will primarily be increased strength which comes (apart from that neuromuscular part and maybe better leverages etc.) from an increased muscle fiber size, while the adaptation of high rep work will primarily be an increase of glycogen stores (Note: very simplistic view here, don't remember all the facts of sarcoplasmic hypertrophy) to sustain the higher need of endurance of the muscle.

But to address your point anyway: Of course you can't fully isolate the one or the other, just as when gaining or cutting weight you can't isolate muscle gain and fat gain just as you can't isolate muscle loss and fat loss. But you can skew the ratio into one or the other direction.

In the absence of volume, hypertrophy will not really occur to a great degree. ID on TM, for instance, is unlikely to produce any significant increase in hypertrophy despite the loading, especially when compared to a 5x5, 6x4, 8x3, etc.

Certainly true... because the higher intensity will mainly increase myofibrillar hypertrophy which takes longer and probably isn't that pronounced in the first place. The adaptation to 5x5 or 8x3 is a good mixture of both strength as well as muscle endurance so of course it will improve both myofibrillar as well as sarcoplasmic hypertrophy so of course you're right here. But that doesn't mean myofibrillar hypertrophy is to be ignored completely and to be fair I've never said intensity work will increase hypertrophy "to a great degree" in the first place.

This is not accurate.

Of course not... I don't remember all the details of sarcoplasmic hypertrophy out of PP but it's not wrong, is it?

At 30% 1RM, sure. But what about 70%? This is not so black and white- we have to be careful here.

At 70% 1RM it's not "hundreds of bodyweight squats" anymore and incorporates exactly what I meant: intensity. Again this is what's written in your article about volume:

Contribution to hypertrophy improvement: Significant. For hypertrophy, volume is the nearly the sole determinant of a workout causing a resulting increase in muscle protein synthesis. This is limited by the body’s ability to respond to volume greater than that which maximizes muscle protein synthesis, however. Thus, volume must be managed appropriately. Tonnage is of minimal concern when it comes to hypertrophy.

Which is a mistake + changing the goal posts.

Possibly... this is what PP teaches though, so a detailed analysis of this would probably be game-changing. Rip and Andy argue iirc that once the weights get too heavy to recover from, you need to reduce the volume to be able to continue progress. And it makes sense to me at least that a 3x5 VD later on can be more taxing than a 5x5 VD at the beginning of the TM when the weights get heavier and heavier.

No, intensity always means % of 1RM.

Then, again, are you sure you didn't mean "weight" instead of "intensity" in these sentences of the article:

It is possible to progressively overload the lifter by adding intensity at a constant volume with sufficient recovery. Alternatively, progressive overload can be achieved by adding volume while keeping the intensity constant.

That would mean in the TM you would start for instance at what would be around 70-75% of 1RM on 5x5 and each week you would do what? Increase the intensity by 1%? So at a conservative 70% start after 10 weeks he would do 5x5 with 80% of his 1RM (which if he started at 315 lb he should have increased lets say conservatively to 350 lb now). Another 10% later he would be doing 5x5 with 90% of his 1RM (which again should have increased by now). You see why I don't see how this (or the other way around with keeping % of 1RM constant and increasing volume) is feasible? I honestly think you just meant "weight" instead of "intensity" there.

The beauty of using a fixed intensity is that the desired stress of the workout can be modulated by volume. The beauty of using a fixed volume is that the desires stress of the workout can be modulated by intensity. But yes, the above works- though admittedly for more trained lifters. It's just a different type of progressive overload.

Yep, see above.

Your assumption that strength relies primarily on intensity is incorrect.

This is interesting to say the least. Could you elaborate? I hope you're not including things like ROM or other things not in scope here. Maybe we should just agree to the following: Volume can't be considered without intensity or the other way around for strength/hypertrophy/etc. purposes.

You cannot get better at something by doing it less (unless overreached) and with less specificity. Not sure how that makes sense. You get better at recovering from deadlifts the more you deadlift, per the Repeated Bout Effect. You get better at recovering from training the more you train, also. The absolute weight on the bar matters little. The relative weight on the bar and volume matter more.

Unless the heavier weight creates a stress that needs longer to recover from, no?

What is stock HLM?

I know what you're trying to refer here to but that's not really the point. 3 day HLM as per PP has pretty much the identical slots and frequencies as the stock TM. In your HLM suggestsion you've swapped the PC with rack pulls and added rows and DB benches. Ignoring the intensity specifications, rep schemes etc. one could make the same changes to the TM without messing with the big four at all and you'd receive identical slots and frequencies once again.

ID and lack of intensity specification are the main drawbacks here.

Sure I've kept that open on purpose... I was focusing solely on frequency and slots, which were the thing you've criticized about the TM and made me think "well... is HLM all that different when it comes to those parameters?"