We are in the second part of our 6 week hypertrophy block. This 3 week phase was a mix of Dave and Lily. He wanted more volume and some specific exercises (like yoke bar speed squats and deficit speed pulls against bands). He also wanted our secondary work broken out by individual weakness. Usually everyone in the little group does the same secondary and accessories with a few changes here and there based on weaknesses/issues etc. But everyone’s weaknesses are becoming vastly different so it's time we all went our separate ways (tear) for about 10 minutes until we reconvene on the rest of the accessories.
Since Dave is on vacation he let me write these 3 weeks then I sent it to him for final review (aka acceptance).
I am way worse at writing weird bodybuilding volume than Dave. Obviously he has a lot of experience with that under his belt (2 belts… one for squatting and one for keeping a rib in place if it pops out) and mine pretty much comes from reading bodybuilding articles when I first started training.
The name of the game during the past 3 weeks has been volume and hypertrophy. That is still the name of said game for the next 3 weeks but I made some changes based on how everyone responded to the past 3 weeks.
Overall, I took the volume down compared to the last 3 weeks but still kept the volume comparably high to other training phases. Everyone was beat to shit the first 3 weeks. I tried to keep the volume up while making sure everyone got the most out of training instead of dragging ass the entire time.
Two of the days I kept in or added a 10x10 for supplemental work (one upper and one lower) and kept a lot of accessories at 5 sets with some of the key exercises going up in sets each week (like reverse hypers and back work). The past 3 weeks we had some 1 set to failure exercises but I took those out and added in some higher rep work (50 reps on close stance leg press and barbell pushups) with increased reps each week.
I tried to wave the overall volume since we train Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday- so for example the 10x10 days were Thursday and Saturday instead of having two back to back cray cray days (with one being on a DE upper day since that is a good time to hit a 10x10 close grip to boards). 10x10 on a lower body day was fine since it was a GHR, not something intense like a good morning.
I also made some changes to the secondary work. The past 3 weeks, most of us had secondary exercises that were different than the rest of our accessories so it ended up being an extra exercise thrown in. The point was to put more effort into the weakness. This time, for the most part, I picked an exercise that was already in the workout. So as a secondary exercise, they could hit it harder without having to add in a shit load of extra volume. In my case, if I was trying to hit my lower back, I actually ended up throwing it in later in the exercise since adding it as a secondary movement just fucked me up for whatever was coming later in the training if it was low back intensive.
The DE work and high set accessories were still a nice fuck-up but I think we all managed to get through the weeks without the permanent feeling of death and not being able to put everything we had into the entirety of the workout (especially since we have 2 back to back days on Saturday and Sunday).
Ok so that was kind of a ramble but I did want to write down everything in my thought process.
