By Andrew McGunagle
When working towards improved strength, it’s very easy to get caught
up striving towards one big, lofty, one-repetition maximum number. If you’re
not careful, the major milestones you shoot for - 185, 225, 315, 405, 500, and
so on - can cause you to make poor programming decisions.
If the gap between your current abilities and your goal is too
large, you might have a tough time making a plan that is efficient. Often,
people in this situation write out non-specific and indirect programs, they
hope for some sort of progress, and they end up floating around in
mid-milestone purgatory for years.
Similarly, impatience can cause individuals to create plans that are
unrealistic. After achieving a goal that took many months - years, perhaps - to
achieve, they get over-ambitious and put together a 12-week plan to, say, take
their deadlift from 405 to 500. After a few weeks of extreme workloads, they
often lose the precious momentum they built when they busted past their last
plateau. Frustration starts to mount, and stagnation usually occurs.
If your only measure of progress is the next big number, then it can
be difficult to know if you’re headed in the right direction if you aren’t
regularly testing your max. Unfortunately, constantly testing your max isn’t
always the best way to build that lift. Therefore, it is important to create a
multitude of high-carryover mini-goals that will provide you with the
conviction you’re on course and moving forward while you do the higher-volume
work that will actually spur progress. The kicker is that these mini-goals must
accurately indicate that you are, in fact, on course and moving forward. If
they don’t correlate with your main goal, then you’re wasting your time working
toward them.
The value of mini-goals is best measured by their specificity to the
main lift and the weakest points in that lift. If your main milestone goal is a
heavier 1RM in a certain lift, then improving your 2RM, 3RM, 4RM, and 5RM for
that lift will be the best indicators of progress for that max. If you’re going
to able deadlift 500 pounds, then you should be able to deadlift 455 pounds for
a certain number of reps and a certain difficulty (RPE). Think beyond rep maxes
into various rep-RPE combinations, and you’ve got lots of mini-goals to shoot
for.
This contention shouldn’t be revelatory for many of you, but I would
like to offer that having a broad swath of concrete numbers to work towards and
ensuring that these numbers remain in balance is a unique and valuable way to
approach your training plan. In order to easily generate concrete numbers to
work towards, I offer the table you’ll find in the excel document linked below.
Use the table to brainstorm options to creatively program in ways
that ensure each rep-RPE value in the 1 to 5 rep range improves and no
combination lags behind. Insert a few future 1RMs into the 1RM cell and look at
the multitude of PRs you can work towards. Quit obsessing about just one
ultimate number – extrapolate and suddenly you’ll have plenty of
momentum-building mini-goals that actually relate to the one big, glorious lift
you envision.
I know there aren't a lot of comments on these posts, but wanted to say I appreciate the work you put into the blog, along with Nuckol's blog, this is one of my favorite resources.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Stephen - glad to know someone's enjoying them! I've mostly been writing the occasional post for fun throughout the past few years, but I've got a big project in the works that I'm hoping will get me up on Greg's level.
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