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Thread: Heavy Medium 4 Day Split

  1. #1
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    Default Heavy Medium 4 Day Split

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    33 yo training for general strength and general swoleness. I have finished LP and I like the weekly progression of HLM but I enjoy upper/lower 4 -day schedule. I was wondering your thoughts on the below example. The progression would be weekly increases on Days 1 and 2 to a possible volume taper to a peak.


    Day 1 Squat 5x5, Deadlift 3-5x5

    Day 2 Bench 5x5, Press 3-5x5, Barbell Row 3-5x5


    Day 3 Squat 5x5 (5% off Day1), Deadlift 3-5x5 (5-10% off Day1)

    Day 4 Bench 5x5 (5% off Day2), Press 3-5x5 (5% off), Barbell Row 3-5x5 (5% off) or Chins


    Thoughts? Concerns, am I crazy? Of course the new MED article is out and thats obviously worth some consideration.

  2. #2
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    Quote Originally Posted by Hunter Jones View Post
    am I crazy?
    Yes.

    You won't be able to sustain weekly increases with that much volume and that much of a sudden increase in volume, unless you back up and start off so light as to be meaningless anyway. You can do a four day split right after LP, sure, but you need to ramp things up at a reasonable rate.

  3. #3
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    Interesting. Very Interesting.

    I thought the volume wouldn't be too much given that, my squat in LP had 9 work sets and I would be moving to 10 work sets in the above hypothetical.

    So, If I wanted to eventually move into a program like the above, how would you go about ramping it up?

  4. #4
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    Assuming you did LP properly, 3 of those 9 weekly sets were at a significant offset, AND they were split up into 3 doses, and you may have been doing top set + back-offs. Your question was not well formulated because you didn't give me your end of LP weights or the approximate % you think you're going to start at for these 5x5s, only that the second day is a 5% offset. But let me be generous and do your work for you, in a hypothetical.

    Let's say you finished LP with a successful 315x5, so your last successful week was 310x5 + 285x5x2, 250x5x2, and then 315x5 +290x5x2. The next week you failed 320x5 both days and since you'd already done one full re-set, decided you're now moving on from LP.

    And let's say you planned to take 90% of your best set of 5 to start your heavy 5x5 day, so Day 1 on your new program would be 280x5x5. Day 2 would be 265x5x5. That's close to 14,000 lbs of weekly squattage. Compare that your theoretical last week on LP where you had just over 11,000 lbs.

    1) You're adding roughly 20% total work overnight.
    2) You're smushing that additional work into 2 sessions instead of it's former spread over 3.
    3) You're doing a whole bunch of hard work at high volume on Monday and then essentially repeating it again Thursday with an almost negligible offset.
    4) That total work is being done at a very similar average intensity and weight, so you can't say you're mitigating the huge sudden increase by dropping the difficulty. But at the same time,
    5) You're not doing any actually heavy reps that make you better at squatting heavy loads for fewer reps, a skill that you have not yet developed if all you've done is an LP.

    So in short, I don't think it's a good approach at all.

    The Day 1 5x5 is fine - you'll need to pay attention to figure out the exact weight, you might do better with a slightly higher or lower % of your 5RM, but it's an OK place to start. On Day 3, I'd do something like two triples at 5 lbs more than your best set of 5 on LP, and then a back-off triple at ~90% of that. So you're going from 30 hard reps per week to 34. Move the triples down to doubles and keep that second day's total reps to under 10, while keeping the first day's volume higher at 5x5, while dropping to doubles and then singles on the heavy day. Running through this once will take you about 10-15 weeks, and by that point you'll have developed your skills in lifting heavy weights for lower reps enough to warrant a discussion about bumping total weekly work up subsequently.

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