For a woman doing an intermediate program like Phase I of the Texas Method, would she do a 5RM or 3RM on intensity day?
I think that a 3RM would make the most sense for the reasons discussed in the article.
"Even to this day, after this has been discussed many times, I regularly see videos of women grinding through and failing sets of 5 on the squat in the first couple of months of your Novice Linear Progression."
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For a woman doing an intermediate program like Phase I of the Texas Method, would she do a 5RM or 3RM on intensity day?
I think that a 3RM would make the most sense for the reasons discussed in the article.
Has the following been considered/tried in making the change to 3s?
Instead of keeping the volume at 15 reps by doing 5x3, would keeping the volume at 15 reps by extending the 3 sets with drop sets have any advantages? Therefore matching set length to the 3x5 of the male programming?
I understand that that makes 6 of the 15 total reps at a lighter load so suggests the drop set idea would be inferior.But I’m thinking about how the first and last rep of a set are different.
When using 5x3, you have 5 reps which are in the recovered state (the first rep of each set) and 5 which are grinders (the last rep of each set), and 5 in the middle.
With 3x5 however, you have only 3 reps at nearly recovered, and only 3 at grinders, but you also have 3 that are nearly grinders (the 4th reps) taking us to 6 reps that are on the tougher end and the remaining are 3 in the middle and 3 which are towards the recovered end of the set but still not fully recovered.
With 3x3 plus an extra 2 reps after each set done as a drop set, would the fact the 2 extra reps were being done in a fatigued state compensate for the lighter load while allowing some extra reps to be done on the grinding side of the scale rather than the recovered side of the scale?
Or is this just seductive and needless complexity?
Thanks
My first time through LP I didn't listen to this. I held off on going to 3s until I'd failed every lift twice, and it was a brutal grind, and then I hurt myself.
This time through I went straight to 3s and it's amazing. I feel successful and strong, not beat up.
But the time commitment compared to my husband doing sets of 5s feels pretty unfair, lol. I'm glad to see you say it's ok to take less time. I had been taking 3-4 minutes but feeling guilty about it.
What do you recommend for warmup sets? Still 2 sets of 5 reps with empty bar, then 5-3-2 reps with increasing weight? Sometimes I feel tired by the time I get to my work set lol.
If you're getting tired by the time you get to work sets, you may be warming up with weights that are too heavy. Your rep scheme sounds right, just make sure they're even jumps. Shoot for around 30-40 lbs jumps between warmups. If your jumps are less than that, do less sets.
Thanks. I think my final warmup sets were too heavy, more like 5-10 lbs away.
I am still struggling to wrap my head around all the implications of neuromuscular efficiency. I get that women need heavier work sets to drive adaptation, because a set of 5 doesn't stress the muscle "as much" as it does for a guy.
What I don't get is why that seems to make women less capable of doing longer sets (5-12 reps)? Is it the same 80% (or whatever) or muscle fibers being used over and over again for each rep? Or is it more like rep 1 uses 80% and rep 2 uses a different 80%? And if thats the case, wouldn't women have more muscular endurance, because 20% of the muscle is spared ever rep? Yet in reality we see women spectacularly fail higher rep sets, for example nailing a press set of 3 at 100lbs but a few days later failing on rep 5 of only 80lbs.