8 wk HLM Intermediate Program
Hi.
I'm a 44 year old, 193 cm (6'3"), 107 kg (235 lbs) intermediate trainee. Recently tested 1 RM and they were: squat 180 kg (396), deadlift 205 kg (452), bench 115 kg (253) and press 80 kg(176). I'm generally eating 3000 kcal a day, sleep 8 hrs and don't drink, for everyone who's going to tell me that at 6'3" I should weight 130 kg, I just can't eat that much. I have been doing 3 sets of 5's seemingly forever most recently in a bastardized HLM setup, I think the lack of low reps affected my 1RM attempts. I'm happy with squat and want to bring the deadlift up but,obviously, bench has the furthest to go. 120 kg went about 5 cm from my chest and stopped. For my next 8 weeks I'm going to do the following, it's HLM but didn't want to do all the heavy stuff on one day, so heavy bench is actually on the light day:
H: squat: 155 kg (341) x 5 x 3
press: 70 kg (154) x 5 x 3
dead: 175 kg (385) x 5 x 3
L: dead: 140 kg (306) x 5 x3
bench: 105 kg (231) x 5 x 1
bench variant: ? x 3 x 4 (close grip 4 wks, pause 4 weeks)
chins: max x 3
M: squat: 140 kg (306) x 5 x 3
bench: 100 kg (220) x 5 x 5
power cleans: 75 kg (165) x 3 x 5
Plan is to keep adding weight every week, once I can't do sets of 5 across on heavy day, drop to 5 and some back offs, then 3's and finally singles across.
So my questions are:
1) Are the starting weights too much? Remember, I want to go to low reps and have recently completed all the above weights for sets across of 5. But seems like these are 85 - 90% of 1 RM, whereas I've seen HLM programs start at 75%.
2) Is swapping light squat for a light dead, in order to groove the lift a little bit, worth doing given the desired deadlift focus?
3) These workouts end up taking a while so I don't do accessory exercises. Are dips, DB presses etc needed for my weak bench?
Thanks in advance all and for the excellent resource here. Cheers!