Graphs from Five Years of SS/PP-style Strength Training

[Sean Stangl]

I finished entering all my training logs from the last 5 years into the computer.

It gave some graphs, which I thought might be interesting to you all since I've been following the advice in Practical Programming for much of it and visualizations are cool.

The red line follows the max calculated Epley 1RM (weight + weight*reps/30) over the week, mentioned by Meshuggah in another thread. The little green Xs are the Epley calculations for each individual day.

Training history is roughly:

• Starting Strength-style linear ramp until 345x5x3, in 10/2011 with some resets and injury. I didn't do the power cleans. GOMAD for the first few months. After that I drank about half a gallon of milk a day for the next few years.
• Texas Method from that point on until mid-2013 with many resets and injuries. I cut out deadlifts entirely because I had not at that point figured out how to integrate them well. They went up regardless.
• A Smolov base cycle before a meet in mid-2013. You will notice that although I got a PR, it's lost in noise and effectively accomplished nothing despite being extremely difficult.
• Advanced Pyramid from PPST3 from 2014 through 2015, with various degrees of success and injury.
• RTS-style training since 2015, which only had a major effect on bench.

I thought it might be interesting to look at the rate of progression, because although SS talks about logarithmic increase until genetic potential, I've never actually seen someone's training history made to fit that. So here it is!

One last note is that you'll see that bench starts off looking logarithmic, but then picks up steam in the middle. This happened when I largely swapped out press volume for bench volume. Bench for me seems to respond very well to high-volume high-frequency.

Hopefully you find this interesting.

[Toasterleavings]

That is beautiful! Now do the Wilks and graph 'em!

[Eric K]

That's some serious dedication. Thanks for sharing.

[Coconut Chris]

This is fantastic Sean. Any chance that you could share your source data (i.e. csv)? I'd love to play with some regressions.

I imagine the downwards spikes while you were doing Texas method are artifacts of the Epley 1RM projection from volume day vs. intensity day.

[Sean Stangl]

That is beautiful! Now do the Wilks and graph 'em!

Good idea! Bodyweight wasn't recorded every training day, but I could do an approximation using the surrounding data.

This is fantastic Sean. Any chance that you could share your source data (i.e. csv)? I'd love to play with some regressions.

Oh, sure! The entire project is available in source form here: GitHub - sstangl/exlog: Personal strength training log and analytics.. If you're on Linux, you should be able to type "make", and it will build the CSV files and generate graphs from them.

If you for whatever reason want to look at the training log, it is the file "exlog", also viewable online here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ss...g/master/exlog. It has comments and stuff.

The CSV files are auto-generated for the project, but I uploaded the squat daily one here: http://people.mozilla.org/~sstangl/squat-daily.csv. The first few lines are commands for the graph generation program, but they also explain what the columns mean.

I imagine the downwards spikes while you were doing Texas method are artifacts of the Epley 1RM projection from volume day vs. intensity day.

Maybe. I reset a lot and tried a bunch of different things to get un-stuck. (The thing that wound up working was heavy singles in place of 5RM.)

[Cody]

That's pretty sweet!

[Tom K]

Cool - thanks for sharing.

[Chris McCarthy]

Excellent!

[Serack]

Dude, the way your bench breaks out after 250lb is really inspiring me. I dicked around with little direction for a year and was pretty happy with my "Gainzzz." Then I discovered PP and SS (in that order) and I've been pleased with the results but have the nagging fear in the back of my mind that if I ever do get to 2 plates working weight (Next week will be my first attempt doing 200lb for reps) I'll plateau out and should be happy with that. Fuck settling, I want a graph like that!

What is your height? Age?

[chrisd]

That is truly impressive. Both the recording and the progress.