The simplest way to start hitting PRs again in your powerlifting training
Periodizing volume for the masters lifter.
Masters lifters are an interesting population to coach in powerlifting. I’ve coached them both online and in person here in Vancouver, BC at my gym in Kitsilano.
There are certainly those where you can push them fairly hard BUT generally your “training budget” is much smaller and the lifters are not able to recover from intense training as quickly.
Does this mean we should avoid training hard? Of course not… the goal is still to get stronger and there’s no replacement for heavy weights.
With that said, it’s easy to fall in to the trap of overloading too frequently and coming at the program like a “young buck”.
Instead, an approach I’ve found to be quite effective in non-peaking blocks is to take one lower body lift and train it at 35-45% of the volume you would normally use and train it once every 7-10 days.
Doing so allows you to maintain your baseline strength on one lift while having extra recovery resources available to you for the lift that you’re focusing on – much the same as a squat or deadlift specialist program might work.
What happens when it’s meet time though? Well, this of course complicates things because wee are trying to bring our best performance on all 3 lifts to the platform on the same day.
To solve this problem, the first place to start is understanding your time to peak for each lift and working backwards from your meet date and spacing out the sessions at 50-100% further apart than you normally would.
Put differently, we can split our overload focus week to week between squats and deadlifts.
In the below video, you can see how the total weekly volume relative to normal training is quite similar BUT the peak intensity is quite different. I’m sure if you’ve ever done a session without top sets you can remember how much fresher you felt compared to a truly overloading one.
Of course how you space out your exact volume and intensity might vary but the purpose of this article is to demonstrate how you could stagger some of your heaviest lower body efforts in order to offset some of the overlapping fatigue that you might run into with trying to overload each lift every week.
Similarly, if you’re already trying a style of program like this but are more sensitive to changes in intensity rather than purely frequency, you could end up with a heavy day every week but skip your top sets every other week for each lift and just do backdowns.
An example overload workout could be working up to a top set of 2 and then backing down 8% for 4 more sets. On an “off” week, you could simply skip the top set and just do 4-5 sets at the projected backdown weight.
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