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Originally Posted by
zepled37
There is a woman friend of mine that I put on the SS workout. She is 39 and about 145 pounds at 5'9". She definitely doesn't really want to gain weight and I think if she maintains she will be happy so this is a constraint in strength gain.
Anyway, she really struggles with the press even though her strength on them is probably decent for a woman. I'm thinking about switching the press to a texas method type progression or just adding back off sets.
Looking for other peoples experience programming the press for females as I'm guessing they all stall out on this pretty fast.
First time through on presses, we started at 45 pounds (bar) and worked up to 60. Went to 2.5 pound increases after 55 pounds. Then we reset back to 50 or 55 pounds and worked up in 2.5 pound increments from there and she got 62.5 for 3 sets of 5 and then yesterday went to 65 but only got 5,5,4.
As I type this, I'm thinking we should just reset back to 55 pounds again, add a single back off set and take 2.5 pound jumps for a while and I should probably figure out how to take only 1 pound jumps. People probably will wonder why the back off set already and I don't know for sure other than my intuition tells me it will be helpful given the light weights and tendency to stall and that she can tolerate it. Seems like a compromise between switching to intermediate programming on the press and still adding more work as I can't believe recovery is an issue yet.