Originally Posted by
Bill Anders
My season to put the lifting on the back-burner is winter, since my primary focus during those months is snowboarding several times a week, which does not lend itself to recovering from heavy lifts. In the past, I just stopped lifting, then restarted my LP each spring from scratch. It was enlightening to go through the NLP a few years in a row, learning more each time, but I topped out at about the same weights for each lift by the time winter rolled around. So no real progress, other than fewer tweaks to deal with each year as the form improved.
During a seminar back in 2019, I talked to some SSCs about this. Their suggestion was to get at least one intensity set in for each lift once a week, since we lose strength so quickly if we don't keep that intensity up. I started doing that over the winter of 2019-20, but of course the 'vid put a halt to that and training for the entire summer. We now have a garage gym, so for this past winter (2020-21) I made sure that I got at least one intensity set per lift per week, and that really did the trick. I didn't slip too much on each lift. IF I thought that I needed a bit more volume, I'd add two backoff sets to that intensity set, but I would not do any sets across.
I'm now transitioning back to resume my LP with a slight deload to compensate for the increased volume. But I'm already within a few weeks of matching, then exceeding, my 2020 max lifts for sets across.
That recent Maintenance article just helped confirmed that I was on the right track.