Partial LP ever make sense?

[poser]

Male, 42. 205#. Extremely Active.

Ive been in “maintenance mode” since the beginning of the year. I did a winter XC bike race in feb which involved quite a bit of training time and I’ve been snowboarding 2-4 days a week, mostly on the higher intensity side with some days being extremely physical: lots of hard climbing at altitude and lots of riding in deep powder which can be extremely taxing. Some of these days were 12-15 hours or longer of exertion. In short, I’ve been walking around with a continuously wasted pair of legs since January. I think I had one dedicated rest day the entire month of Jan and 2 dedicated rest days in the month of Feb. I’ve burned untold tens of thousands of calories in endurance based activities with extreme and continuous anaerobic output. Seriously, I can’t emphasize how hard I’ve gone on many of these days, but I did manage to get to a place where I felt relatively recovered on a day to day basis.

I had a lull in January where I wasn’t making any progress and regressed in some areas but once my body adjusted, I’ve been able to make some progress. Squatting has been very low volume, but, after some initial
Regression, I have managed to increase the weight on the bar within this context by 15# despite the activity level. Fives, especially multiple sets, are a bit detrained. Weekly squat setup has been:

M: 5 “Heavy” singles: 330# to 345#
w: Front squat 3x3 (no increase)
F: 1x5. 295# to 315#.
A backoff 1x5 added some weeks.

On two Fridays, I did deloads of 3x5 at 185#

Pressing has seen decent progress (all things considered) as have the supplemental pulls: power cleans and snatches. Deadlift, because of how taxing it is, I have not attempted to add weight to the bar. Overall, I would have been happy with maintenance across the board, so to see some progress in certain areas (Press and supplemental pulls) has been good.

Anyway, I have a window of dedicated training time coming up as we are looking to have a very early spring. My plan has been to run a few weeks of LP primarily to get my squat back up. LP will make the most sense to readjust to volume. That being said, i don’t necessarily see a reason to reset my pressing or pulls. Though I haven’t increased my deadlift at all, pulling volume has been continuous and rather high. There were 2 weeks when I did not deadlift at all, but power cleans and power snatches were maintained, so pulling detraining should be minimal if nonexistent and should resume progress without a hitch with adequate recovery introduced.

So, my question is, in this case, would it potentially make sense to run a cycle of LP just for squats and continue intermediate progress forward with the press and pulling? My intent is to reset squats to 275# for 3x5 and take them back up to ~335# 3x5, but I don’t see much benefit in resetting the other movements when they can conceivably continue progress from present numbers.

[Brent Carter]

Not all movements have to progress at the same rate. So the answer to your question is: