I am going to start this blog post off with a rant. If you are going to pay me to be a part of a team I coach or program I am structuring for you there is probably a REASON for everything. I had a young powerlifting team member come in early today (5 hrs before the team meets) getting ready to train, I gave him 2 options, go home and wait or train with me. You can probably guess what he chose, sucks for him. It was great on my end cause he thought he could keep up. Backstory, after my meet I took 6 weeks to step away from the bar, move to the midwest and work on my work capacity, aka GPP. This youngin is motivated and just wants to compete and stated they would just not come in if it was just going to be GPP, you can imagine how excited I was to find this out while he was working with me during this Hypertrophy phase. Enter Julia, who knows how to crush people souls and is really good with metabolic stress exercise prescriptions, REALLY GOOD. The agenda for the day was, "3x3 cluster sets with 3 rounds" what that looks like typed out:
Work up to a crappy 3 with chains wait 15 second, same weight another 3, 15 seconds, same weight another 3-

3-minute break

repeat... TWO MORE TIMES

Now wrap your head around that, if you follow me on social media I have started making quick Instagram videos saying, "walking away from Monday like" accompanied by a video of me on the floor or crawling. Any guesses as to how far my team member made it? Il save you the suspense, he made it through the second cluster, it then took him 1 hr and 45 minutes to:
-Get his color back
-not feel like he was going to puke
-cool down enough to drive home
-get nutrients into his body
-catch his breath

THIS RIGHT HERE is why powerlifters need GPP and to lose the ego, step away from the bar and condition themselves. It was a great learning experience for them and I felt like I was watching a movie based on a previously written book played out in real life, entertainment at it's finest

This was our second week at this movement, I was up 20lbs from last week so I was happy but realized we forgot our pre-fatigue, standing hamstring curls, with that in mind I honestly am not sure I would have finished the last 3 reps of the last cluster