You could also try adding pin press to one of your “lower” days, so that you’re pressing three times a week with increased volume. I’ve been doing that with pin presses lately.
Have an idea for progressing ever OTHER week on Press.....
first of all: 28, M, 265
second: 4 day upper/lower, been training about 7 months.
Last session:
Volume press 170 x 5 x 5 Sunday
Intensity 207.5 x 3 x 2,2,1 (fail) Wednesday
I’m thinking maybe I need to progress every other week b/c as much as I drive up volume I keep hitting a wall when it gets heavy.
So my idea is to alt. Intensity day oly press with pin press. And volume day strict press and oly press, set up so there is one variant a week. Has anyone tried this??? Or should I periodize this lift somehow? It seems like adding variants would be the min affective dose change rather than cramming some type of loading transmutation peaking into 4 workouts. I think that wouldn’t make sense till I need 3-4+ weeks to hit PRs. Any thoughts?
You could also try adding pin press to one of your “lower” days, so that you’re pressing three times a week with increased volume. I’ve been doing that with pin presses lately.
Never done pin presses do you find them helpful? How taxing are they?
I like them a lot actually. I do them for 4 sets of 5. For a while I did them at my start position height, now I alternate three weeks of that height with three weeks of forehead height (my personal sticking point).
I’m not sure how to answer your question about them being taxing. One thing I’ll suggest is to do them with ramping sets the first time you try them (e.g. 135, 140, 145, 150), then the next time do sets across with the previous week’s top weight (i.e. 150).
Are you prioritizing the press (which it sounds like) over the bench? What is your bench press programming looking like? What do you mean you drive up volume?
There was an example not too long ago where Paul Horn had a client on standard 3-day TM (IIRC) and they reset volume day a few times and still kept intensity day weights going up. So maybe try lowering volume day intensity to like 150-160 x 5 x 5? And if you're failing intensity day weights, it sounds like it's too heavy, or you're not quite recovered from volume day, so maybe cut that down a notch too?
By drive up volume I just mean tonnage I was on 3x5 and ran that up as far as I could then reset and went to 4x5, ran that up, just switched to 5x5 and am still making progress on volume day. You might be right about recovery but i haven’t had problems with my bench in a while so I’m kinda stumped. I’ll try messing with volume. Couldn’t hurt to lower the weight and be more strict too
PPST suggest the possibility of cycling rep ranges every intensity day. So instead of doing 5 rep maxes for a few weeks, then 2 sets of 3 for a few weeks, then 3 sets of two for a few weeks, then 5 singles for a few weeks, you actually alternate every friday.
So this friday you PR 5 reps, next friday PR 3 reps, next friday PR 2 reps, next friday PR one rep, then reset the cycle again and start with a new 5 rep PR. So you only set a PR for each amount of reps once a month, but set a PR every week, jsut cycling the different level of reps. i know i didn't do a great job of fully explaining but PPST discusses possible ideas here.