Need advice

[multiman]

Heres my short story, will be 40 next month..weight 172 and gaining started at 160, eat at least 5 good meals a day(lots of animal), tried milk but cant consume any where near gomad and it destroyed my appetite( I do drink some lactaid) , been squatting for 4 months now but bought the book and only doing SS strictly for about 1.5 months. Squat started at 115

last worksets are
squat 220x5x3
dl 275x5x1
press 105x5x3 have failed twice
bp 165x5x3

I'm starting to not recover quick enough..I can't do the program..I work 60+ hrs a week and my day starts at 2 a.m., have a family and don't get the proper sleep(5-7 hrs/night), I can't change this.

My question is should I microload or is changing rep count an option. For example. today I should squat 225x5x3 but i'm still pretty sore from saturdays 220x5x3. would squatting 225x3x3 an option then wed try for the 225x5x3. I also switched dl to once a week and have been doing pullups twice a week to help w/ upper body strength.

Thank you for any advice and please be kind..lol.. I don't feel i'm ready to switch programs yet because I'm still making progress and working on technique.

David

[MikeC1]

In your situation, you would probably be best off with making one of your workouts a light day for the squat (or two workouts light if you are really having difficulty recovering).

On your upper body lifts, start microloading if you haven't already. If you feel the need to change the set/rep scheme, change the number of sets, but keep the reps the same.

[Tamara Reynolds]

Head over to The Elderly section and talk to the guys who are adapting SS or TM based on age/recovery issues. I have one lifter in his 50s on TM who has adapted squat programming based on what Rip has to say about older trainees. At some point, people have played with rep schemes, especially on press and bench. Most of my gym is over the age of 35 and they all have families and lives outside of lifting, so people do what they need to do. As long as you can stay consistent with your training, you will be fine. Slower progress is better than no progress at all.

[multiman]

thanks for the replys, I searched a bit more of the elderly section and found some recommendations to only add weight once a week..suppose that was my where my question was going but I'm not sure how to accomplish that on the novice program..my origional thought was to up the weight when i achieve 5x3 on a given workout, then lower the rep count and work up to 5x3 again with the new weight.

Anyway today I squatted 225x3x5 (also read to do 5 sets of 3) but missed on the last set(my first squat dump) then I bp'ed 170x3x3(friday i hope to get 4x3 )

Personally i'm pretty damn happy with my progress, Ive never bp'ed 170 before and squatted 225, even though I can't up the weight next time I can shoot for more reps till i get to 5x3.

Thanks for the help, just want to know if there is a better way to go about it..or is my reasoning ok..