Easy programming techniques to progress you from your plateau once your beginner program has stopped working.
The best gains of your life are behind you.
The beginner phase is over and your basic Stronglifts 5×5, Texas Method, GZCLP, or even Starting Strength have grown stale. You’ve done the resetting and still, you’re grinding your brains out trying to hit new PRs when you finish those dreaded reset phases.
Here’s how to progress past this plateau and well into the late intermediate phase where you’ll feel like your lifts are worthy of competing in local powerlifting meets with.
The Problem with Linear Periodization
As you start lifting, you’re not strong enough to do any lasting damage or inflict enough stress on your body to take a long time to recover. As a result, very little periodization is needed and linear periodization strategies work very well.
They are predictable and allow for quick progression.
But as you get stronger and grow more skilled in the squat, bench press and deadlift, each rep you do holds more weight (figuratively and literally). The cost of training is higher. Your time to bounce back and grow stronger is no longer days or even weeks, but multiple weeks.
It can feel so confusing moving from a weekly type program into a larger time-span, especially because of how many options are there.
4-week style wave load comes in. It allows you to progress for a fixed period of time and then you can fine tune and adapt the rate of progression as you get stronger instead of needing to find a whole new program for that next plateau as you become closer to advanced.
This article will showcase 2 styles of wave loading based on how much recovery is needed from your PR attempts.
Small Waves (Early Intermediate)
Our first style of wave loading involves a +4/-1 pattern of loading.
- 4 weeks of progression, building to new PRs in 2.5% increments.
- 1 week of backtracking
- repeat to the next PR.
This results in a fairly rapid progression and is the perfect fit for someone who is coming off of a linear program like the ones mentioned at the start of this article.
By allowing for a moderate amount of recovery, you can pre-emptively ward off plateaus from PR attempt-related recovery challenges and build momentum into your training program again.
As a starting point for this program, we would begin with week 1 at 70-75% of your 1 rep max to err on the side of conservatism. It’s always best to start too light and push for more aggressive progression than trying to run damage control from overcooking a program in week 2.
If you’ve been running a 5×5 program and your current 1-rep max is 225 lbs on bench, your program would look like this:
Each lifter’s ability to rep certain %s varies widely and this is quite individual.
For example: Below is a video of Daniel taking 595 for a triple on squats mid-late block (week 4 of a 5 week block). It represents about 91% of his current max and that’s within 1% of typical for rep-ability. When I’m programming target weights for his top sets, I tend to bump his training %s 1-2% higher than average because of this.
Other lifters like Mel have an ability to take VERY high percentages of their max, far outside of normal rep zones and do it for high reps.
Below is a video of Mel. We’ve been working together a while now and her 1RM squat has steadily moved from just under 200 lbs to the mid 200s. At the time of this video, her best squat was 232lbs and in the video she took 210lbs (90.5%) for 9 reps which was over a 20lb PR for 8+ rep sets that day.
Typically, lifters who have this ability to do higher than average rep PRs respond better to lower set counts and higher intensity sets with modalities like AMRAPs but that’s a topic for another article on workload distribution.
Back to individualizing your training percentages.
If you can do 5 reps @ 80% of your 1-rep max with approximately 2 reps in the tank (8 RPE), the above percentages will work well for you. Adjust accordingly.
The reason we start with a 4 week wave building up to (but not past) a typical 5×5 weight is because we want to shed the accumulated fatigue from banging your head against the wall of linear progression and spending a little over a month in a submaximal phase allows you to wipe the slate clean and start with a fresh foundation to work from.
Don’t skip it. You might hit a PR 4 weeks sooner but you will plateau several months sooner if you do this.
Seriously, just keep it in your pants and wait 7 weeks to hit your next PR and dial in your technique in these initial submaximal weeks.
Moving into the next block of training (weeks 5-8), we reset the training weights back to where our second wave starts where wave 1 (week 1-4) had programmed week 3. I’m sure you can imagine how this starts to stack up.
- End of Wave 1: no PR
- End of Wave 2: 2.5% PR
- End of Wave 3: 7.5% PR
… - After 13 waves (1 year): +55%
With a modest reset at the start of the training wave, we end up building in 2 submaximal weeks before you hit your next PR, effectively making this program a 50/50 split between progression and recovery.
On the submaximal weeks (1-2), you recover and use the lighter weights to focus in on technique.
On the PR focused weeks (3-4), you take the new technique you’ve worked on and grind through a couple new PRs.
Bigger Waves (Late Intermediate)
Like every programming strategy, +4/-1 will run stale at a certain point and there won’t be enough recovery built in anymore. You’ll reach week 3 and 4 of the wave and start missing your top sets again and the PRs stop flowing.
What do you do? No, you don’t need to go back and go search the internet for some new random template.
PAY ATTENTION!
Look at how much progress you’ve made with this +4/-1 strategy.
Building more recovery in to your program allowed you to add hundreds of pounds onto your total. Why not just add a bit more recovery in to a proven system?
Instead of having 50% of your month focused on recovery, shift towards 75% to give your body more time to catch up to the PRs.
You can always go down the rabbit hole of set/rep/volume manipulations but keep in mind at this stage that’s needlessly making things complex. You’ll have plenty of time to give yourself a headache when programming as an advanced lifter in a few years time.
For now, we hold the reps and sets constant, but backcycle harder to rebuild. Like with the first version (small waves), we start with conservative percentages to allow for one block of non-PR work before moving into the next wave where we begin to push for more progression again, but at a slower rate.
- 4 weeks of progression, building to new PRs in 2.5% increments.
- 1 week of backtracking by 5% instead of 2.5%
- repeat to the next PR.
A Note on Frequency
This entire article talks about how to program your primary day for the week and doesn’t discuss lighter/recovery days.
A classic upper/lower split would have you doing something as follows:
- Monday: medium intensity upper
- Tuesday: medium intensity lower
- Thursday: primary/heavy upper
- Friday: primary/heavy lower
(more information on programming medium days here)
This wave structure would be used on your heavy/overload days as the goal is to push progression on the lifts, then go light enough on the medium/secondary day that you can show up and crush it on the Thursday/Friday workout each week.
BONUS: Free 20-Week Program
Ready to take the next step in your powerlifting training?
This program is intended for lifters who:
- Intermediate lifters who have been lifting 6+ months
- Have reached a plateau with conventional strength programs
- Are feeling like their rep PRs and/or assistance movements are getting stronger but not carrying over to a new 1RM on their main lifts
- Are feeling banged up and overly sore
- Have some nagging injuries and/or muscle imbalances which are holding their training back
If this is you, download the programs below. I’d recommend doing the Hypertrophy Program first in order to set you up for the best possible strength gains in the Strength Program.
This “hard reset” tends to lead to larger PRs in the Strength Phase.
Click the button below to get your free copy.
2. Follow me on Instagram (@strongeryoupt) for free lifting advice, programs and more powerlifting content.