A little help, please.

[Joe Murphy]

My vitals:

Male, 54 years old, 210 pounds, 5'11". Down 23 pound in the last few months, goal is to get to a lean 198, so cutting. May regroup and build back up to ~220, remains to be seen.

Workout below (one day off between lift days and I'm not counting warm-ups or any additional ancillary stuff here.)

A: Press 531; Bench 5x5 @80% E1RM

B: Dead 1x5; Squat 5x5 @80% E1RM

C: Bench 531; Press 5x5 @80% E1RM

D: Squat 531; Dead asst ???

Due to the weight loss and various self-inflicted set-backs since the holidays my lifts are down, but this is my routine and I'm back to it. I'm wondering about workout D, and what I should add to complement my pulling? (I left out various ancillary work like chins, dumb bell rows and hyper-extensions.) Also, I've moved shrugs to press days because a day of rest isn't enough if I do them on pull/squat days, this impacts my pressing too much and I've started to think of them as a shoulder lift--and really like them.

More to the point, deadlifting isn't fun for me, I probably neglect it and want to improve it. It is hard to recover from. So, the questions: Is once a week at 1x5 enough, what should my "D" day pulling assistance be and if I rotate it, on what schedule; I've been thinking about alternating rack pulls with partials, shit like that, but don't know if two weeks between 'rack pull Friday' is beneficial or not. Also, I'm interested in other lifts that might drive my deads. I could try to do more deadlifting, of course, and will if that's what it takes.

I'd really like to get my deadlift from today's pretty easy 295x5 to 4 plates+. Doesn't seem like that's so much to ask.

Thanks, boyos.

[Nick Delgadillo]

That would be a great day to power clean or snatch.

[Joe Murphy]

That's what I think, as well, Nick. I haven't learned them because I started lifting after I was 50 and Rip has suggested they might be ill-advised for my demographic. Don't think it was a blanket warning, though.

[Nick Delgadillo]

I wouldn't say ill-advised. Unnecessary at your age, maybe. But you deadlift 300 for a set of 5. What the hell, right?

[Scott Hanson]

FWIW Joe,

I'm slightly older than you are and taught myself the olympic lifts at about 48-50. They're fun, but I never found power cleans to help my dead-lift very much. For the past few months I haven't done any cleans or snatches and have set numerous dead-lift PR's. My dead-lift assistance on squat days has been 2 sets of stiff-leg dead-lifts at 8-10 reps. I'm not following 531, but a similar, higher volume program from PPST: 1 lift a day.

[Clay Simczyk]

Have you considered deficit deadlifts?

[Joe Murphy]

Thanks, guys. I warmed up and did 315x5 today and it went just fine*. I might try the stiff-legged/halting/rack pull rotation. Clay, I'm only dead lifting one time per week for recovery purposes; I suppose lighter deficits might be okay, but a more difficult dead lift variant seems counter productive. And to Scott's point, I really only want to risk the dynamic-type pulls if I can do them (safely) at a weight that benefits my dead lift.

*I keep thinking running an additional 10 pounds per set of 5 once per week is not enough but maybe I should just run it out and see? Maybe it will keep working for several more weeks, which could get me close to a E1RM of 4 plates... We'll see, I guess.

[Michael Wolf]

If it's working right now, keep running it - but always good to think about what you'll do when something inevitably stalls, especially if it's likely to be soon. You may find that 1 set of 5 absolutely maximum deadlifts - once it gets to the point that your new 5 rep weight is actually truly grindingly hard - is harder to recover from than 2-3 lighter sets of five that are still heavy.