Shanker Paul Carter's Strong-15 week 6

The Strong-15 template (which I encourage you all to MTFU and buy, go visit Paul Carter's blog to get it, it's a measly 15 bucks. Given the amount of information he disseminates for free, this is ludicrously cheap) is a 9 week meet prep routine structured around hitting each of 3 attempts. It's broken up into three 3 week micro-cycles, the first of which builds up to the equivalent of hitting your first attempt, the second your second attempt and so on...

The workouts themselves follow a 5/4/3/2/1/1/1 backoff template structured around hitting increasing percentages of the attempt for that respective cycle, followed by a backoff set at a lower percentage done to failure. The idea is that you work up to 95% of the attempt in the final week of your micro cycle, then perform the backoff set to, or in excess of the number of reps you would need to feel comfortable to hit that weight. (This utilizes the same formula/judgment that 5/3/1 uses to assess progress). The program can be structured any number of ways around this basic philosophy, personally I isolated the lifts on their own days, so this ends up being a 3 day a week program with 2 days of conditioning (hill sprints).

I started the program 6 weeks ago with the following attempts programmed in for each lift. If I were going to actually do a meet, these would be my target lifts. Firsts are easy, seconds are small PR's and the thirds are lifts that would be really kickass to hit.

Squat

365

385

405

Bench

255

275

285

Deadlift

515

555

575

I just finished the second micro-cycle in the program and the following are the results from this second test week.

Squat

up to 365x1

backoff: 315x10

Bench

up to 255x1

backoff: 220x10

Deadlift

up to 525x1

backoff: 475x7

The thing I'm particularly proud of here is that after week 6, my backoff sets indicate that I should be able to hit my third attempts with relative ease. All of them are PR's (some are small, like bench where I've hit 225x9 in the past couple months and some are quite significant, as the squat for 315x10 was easy, given my previous PR of 315x8).

The intensity goes up from here over the final 3 weeks (parts of which I will be in Boston for), so it's time to buckle down and hopefully hit some more PR's.

Other relevant information:

BW: 192

BF: approx 10-11%

Conditioning: I define really good condition as being able to run 20 hill sprints of 40 yards without stopping for a rest apart from walking back down. It's been posited that that's roughly the level of conditioning required of an NFL running back (20 touches in relatively quick succession). As of right now I can run 12 sprints with ease. Note, that this isn't a priority as I'm trying to hit my attempts here so my focus is on strength. I do these following a leg day as quasi recovery and because they make me feel really fucking good.

Cheers!