That makes a lot of sense. Thanks. If I had to prioritize things between the bench and the press, it would be the press.
I don't know about the 4 day split, especially with the squat. I don't know if I can recover from 5x5 in one day on the squat. I'm a 41 year old male with chronic insomnia. I have done sleep studies, seen sleep specialists, therapists, etc. I've only found minor relief, but nobody has been able to fix it. I go to bed for 9 hours, but only get between 6 and 7 hours of sleep each night, regardless of how hard I trained that day. In my 20's I used to be able to sleep 9 to 10 hours straight through, if I had a long hard day of work, or did a heavy set of squats. Not anymore. So it is tough for recovery. My diet is in good shape, but nothing I can do for my poor sleep, which is big for recovery.
Right now I am doing a HLM programming (I'm actually doing MLH instead) on the squat and it begins to look like the Texas method, 3 day program, as I taper the heavy day to run it out.
Monday: Medium - Squat 3x5 90% of Friday and then light pull
Wednesday: Light - Squat 3x5 80% of Friday and then Deadlift 1x5 + 5 lbs of last week
Friday: Heavy - Squat 3x5 + 5 lbs of last Friday and then Light Pull
When I get to the point that I can't do 3 sets of 5 of Friday, I go to a top set of 5 and then 2 backoff sets at 90%. So the volume of the Texas method is spread out over Friday and Monday. I ran this out and am just staring another cycle trying to clean up my technique a bit on the squat while I go. When I run it out the top set of 5 on Friday becomes 2 sets of 3. When I can't do it anymore, which then becomes 2 sets of 2, then I go to 5 singles, then 3 singles. When that becomes too tough, I do 1 single. But, I still do the back off sets on Friday in a way that the tonnage continually goes up. At the end it was difficult to do 3x5 on Monday at the same intensity as those backoff sets, but switching to 4x4 on Monday helped.
I think that the compressed Texas Method might be okay for me on the bench and press though, since last year I was doing HMM on the press, plus an extra day to bench and made some good progress:
Monday: Heavy - Press 3x5 + 2 lbs of last Monday
Wednesday: Medium - Press 3x5 90% of Monday
Friday: Bench 3x5 + 5 lbs of last Friday
Saturday: Medium - Press 3x5 90% of Monday
When I couldn't get 3x5 anymore on Monday, I switched to 5x3 and then worked down to 5x2 with backoff sets. The bench press stalled out pretty quickly though, with only training it once per week, so I wasn't sure how to keep that moving up. Things were working great on the press though, but had an injury and had to back off on the weight a lot. I have now slowly worked back up to where I left off and wanted to try your Compressed Texas method, so that I can get the press and bench to keep moving upwards. I'm trying to really taking things slowly in acclimating to the 5x5 volume days, just starting with 3x5 the first week and adding a couple of extra reps those days each week, so that I don't have my recent injury flare up.