I've been a competitive powerlifter for almost 20 years now. My first meet was in 2000. Since that time I've done at least 1 meet a year... and in my early days 2-3. I never really did back to back meets and thoroughly enjoyed post-meet time away from training being so demanding.
Now, here I am 20 years later and still feel the same way. Probably even more in favor of time away from pushing heavy weight. At the age of 38 with 20 years of intense training under me, my body is definitely telling me to chill out. If you follow my log, you've probably seen me mention short phases where I'm doing more athletic movements and other "fun" stuff. (I'd even like to take some time to do more concentrated yoga... but that's for another day.)
Once we finished our GPP phase after the meet (which definitely included athletic movements, sprinting), we wanted to move into more hypertrophy/bodybuilding stuff. So we did.
Christian asked me to write up the programming for us and the IPA powerlifting team. The first 2 weeks went well. Then weeks 3 and 4 my mind drifted back into powerlifting. As we discussed what we wanted to do, I started to focus more on hitting our weaknesses (which isn't a bad thing), but it suddenly felt like powerlifting again.
Christian made a comment that his mentality, because of the movements chosen, made him feel like a powerlifter. We weren't getting the pump we hoped for and the movements weren't the best for what we were hoping to accomplish.
For our mental state and physical state, we really didn't want to move heavy weight like a powerlifter. We didn't want to focus on heavy. We wanted to focus on muscle.
So with the next two weeks that I wrote (which we just started), we did just that. We picked better movements. I paired things together that complimented each other very well. I chose secondary movements that added a fatigue element that we were looking for.... fatigue from the standpoint of recruiting a lot of fibers without the heavy weight or stress on the joints.
Mission accomplished. Let's see if we can keep this rolling.
Stay tuned for what we did.