Programming Help / Weight help

[jayjackson]

I'll spare everyone from an introduction and get straight into the questions. Here are my current stats.

6'1 - 230 lbs - 29 years old

Bench 230 x 5
Squat 340 x 5
Deadlift 405 x 5
Overheadpress 162.5 x 5
Barbell Row 245 x 5

I've been training consistently for a few years now and I feel like my numbers should be much higher than they are. My lifts also seem to be low, relative to my bodyweight. I'm stalling across the board right now on my lifts. I'm not sure if I should go ahead and gain more weight or consider cutting some weight beforehand. I've done deloads more than once and failed around the same weight. The training method I have been using has been Madcow's 5x5 method which I switched to AFTER stalling on starting strength. I purchased the blue book three years ago and switched to Madcow in January. I'm training Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

Day 1 (Volume): 5 Ascending sets of 5.
Day 2 ('Recovery'): 2 Ascending sets of 5 + 2 straight sets of 5 capped at 70-80% of Monday's lifts
Day 3 (Intensity): 4 Ascending sets of 5, plus a top set of 3, and a back-off set of 8.

[Mark Rippetoe]

The First Three Questions | Mark Rippetoe

Practical Programming for Strength Training, 3rd edition – The Aasgaard Company

[Cole Gorton]

usually you ask yourself "am i getting too much training dose or too little". you dont mention your intensities/percentages so its hard to determine total dose, but it looks to me like you are doing too much volume to me. a recovery day with 4 working sets may be too much stress after previously doing 5x5. then your medium day is also crammed with volume. I think 3 day TM is a better setup than the current madcow one you are doing and it follows a similar structure. my recommendation would be take a 10% deload and do TM as written

Volume
Squat 5x5
Bench 5x5

Recovery
Squat 2x5
press 3x5
chins or rows

Intensity
squat 3x2 / 2x3 / 5x1
bench 3x2 / 2x3 / 5x1
DL x3 / x2 / x1 (can do a light backoff set of DL or SLDL)

just my 2 cents

[jayjackson]

The First Three Questions | Mark Rippetoe

Practical Programming for Strength Training, 3rd edition – The Aasgaard Company

Thank you. I purchased the gray book and read the first article you linked. Can you give me your opinion on my body weight?

[Mark Rippetoe]

For your bodyweight, you're not very strong. You didn't do the program correctly. That's why I linked to the article and the book.