Programs like strong lifts 5×5 and even more complex apps like Juggernaut AI rely on repetition of specific lifts to drive progress in the big 3. This means doing a competition-style squat, bench press and deadlift fairly often. This is one way of expressing the idea of specificity. While this can work for many lifters, the repetitive nature of such programs can be problematic for lifters where physical recovery comes at a premium. If you work a physical job or are simply banged up, just doing the same lifts all the time might not work since you’ll be fighting off injuries and pain whenever it’s time to go for that next personal record.

In fact, there’s a whole subset of lifters who want to compete in powerlifting but never seem to be able to get their numbers past the early intermediate phases, not because the programs don’t work, but because they can’t keep healthy enough to keep progressing (often due to not making their whole life about powerlifting). The physical demands of your job, old injuries and just life in general can catch up to you and are a barrier to progress with these more “vanilla” approaches to powerlifting training.

Background

This article will be a case study on a lifter I work with named JR. He was stuck around the 200 lb mark on his bench, but because of his work as a mechanic (in spite of doing all the things he was supposed to do), he just kept running into issues with things going well in his lifts until it was time to PR and then he’d get some week out of hell at work (with overtime) and then the whole thing was gone.

We’re going to outline first how we got past the initial stages of injury (restoring mobility and building technique) and then I’ll share the exact program that we use now, which took his bench all the way up to his most recent PRs of 255*3 and 265*2 (as of July 2025). This same approach is what will help him build to our goal of reaching a regional qualifying total in about 6 months time.

If you’re just here for a program you can paste your numbers into and train, you can access the file with the training program that took JR to his most recent PR of 265×2 (at the time of writing this article). If you’re interested to know WHY we made the training decisions so that you can customize that template for yourself, read on…

The First 4 Months of Coaching: Restoring Mobility and Tendon Health

Having never worked with a coach before, JR had been looking to many online resources to solve his pains. This meant he had worked generally on mobility, “rehab” exercises and a variety of other “one-off” items, but never anything that was a targeted piece in a bigger picture plan. It’s very easy to find stuff to keep busy with when you’re lacking a big picture vision of your training program so that’s where we started.

Due to the mobility and recovery limitations he was dealing with, he would be able to push strength in his training for a couple weeks and then his body would start to fall apart like clockwork. Forearms, elbows, shoulders and neck would all get really angry at him and he would end up being stuck between sandbagging his training for a while to let everything heal (but not getting stronger), or flirting with a longer lasting injury if he tried to push through.

We first started with an objective assessment of his overall range of motion, particularly in his shoulders and thoracic spine. You must first have the range of motion to express strength before being able to build it there.

Once we had identified his range of motion deficits (about 10-15 degree limitations in both shoulder external and internal rotation), we used principles from the Postural Restoration Institute to rebuild his shoulder range of motion in both his warmups and on his off days.

On the training front, we started working on taking a more general approach to training, with a focus on a broader selection of lifts, more varying rep counts and an overall “less 1RM specific program”. This allowed us to work on developing weak points at intensities that would let him train for more than a couple weeks at a time without injury as we worked on building his overall range of motion in his joints.

8-Week Plateau Breaker Phase 1: Builder Lifts

For the training side of things, we settled on having weeks that alternated between a large and a short range of motion focus for the lift. Adopting a conjugate-style approach here allowed us to develop the “skill” of lifting heavy on his primary lifts while keeping overall volume low on those lifts. Since the higher volumes on his primary lifts was a contributing factor in his recurring injuries, this let us sidestep that altogether and we made up the deficit in total training volume (too little and you will detrain!) by way of machine work and other exercises that put him at a mechanical disadvantage.

Below is a sample of his phase 1. Note the following rules being abided to:

maximum 2 days per week of pressing. Higher frequencies + physically demanding jobs don’t mix.
No flat benching on the secondary day to keep the shoulders healthy
25-35% more volume on the primary day
Weak point accessory slot should be rotated periodically, based on how the main bench looks.
Primary Lifts should target maximum of one area of the lift per month
- Close grip targets a bigger ROM on the shoulders, more tricep emphasis
- Floor Press (overload) has less stress overall on the shoulders, focuses on the transition point. This lift does not get pushed as hard/aggressively as the week 1/3 lifts.
- 3-count bench (underload) high stress on the pecs, this is the primary focus of the entire block and we found that putting his movement on a week 3 had the most desirable result on his competition bench, especially in competitions where the pauses can be longer than average.

We set the block up as follows:

Week 1: Large ROM lift (camber bar bench, swiss bar, close grip, etc)
Week 2: Overload partial ROM lift (floor press, board press, etc)
Week 3: Primary Weak Point Lift (Long pause bench press). Our focus was on taking a 5lb PR in each rep range over the course of several blocks here
Week 4: Deload.

8-Week Plateau Breaker Phase 2: Competition Bench

We had run phase 1 several times at this point and while JR’s bench was now reliably in to the low-mid 200s with no shoulder/elbow issues holding back his pressing, we had found that his strength was not as predictable as we would have liked when it came to dialing in for a specific date/week (like you need to do for a powerlifting competition).

As such, we added a second phase to this approach where we would briefly introduce more specificity and train his competition bench for a strength peak (1-3RM) on week 3 of the second block. In a competition context, that would mean that the whole training block would begin 3 weeks out and the touch and go bench on week 4 would be done in a deload fashion to flush out after the meet.

This second phase allowed for both more predictability in his peak strength for competing in powerlifting meets as well as a way to prevent stagnation by leaning more into the strategy of higher variation that had historically worked so well for him. In fact, JR just hit a PR of 265×2 at the end of his most recent training block (which is a 10 lb PR for him over his last 2RM test from ~ 4 months ago).

The basic set up was as follows:

Week 1: 3-ct (previous block’s focus lift) @90-95% of the week 3 target weight
Week 2: Competition style bench press build @ 85-90% of week 3 target weight
Week 3: Competition style bench 1-3RM test.
Week 4: deload

Annual Training Plan Considerations

We set things up using the following parameters:

No more than one lift per problem area per month
Alternate Phase 1 and Phase 2, do not do 2x of either phase in a row
If any of the builder lifts (high incline, overhead press, JM press, etc) stop showing a direct correlation between improvement on said lift and the focus lifts for the block, they get cycled out on the next training block.

Of course, this entire training plan follows some pretty radical individualization, but I hope it is helpful for you in designing your own approach if you’ve been feeling stuck by injuries and not sure how to progress past them using the current “mainstream” methods.

If you’d like a free copy of the program (organized into a google sheet for easy access), you can get a free copy of it following the steps below.

Free Copy of the 2-Phase Training Program That Allowed JR to avoid plateaus, consistently PR his bench and eliminate shoulder pain

If you’d like a free copy of the program (organized into a google sheet for easy access), you can get a free copy of it following any of the 3 methods below.

Enter your contact details in the form below, it will link you to the spreadsheet immediately.
DM me the word BENCH FRAMEWORK on Instagram
Join my powerlifting community: Starting Powerlifting. I’ve got 13 other free powerlifting guides in there alongside this program that you can get for free by joining me there.

PS – here’s another way I can help you prepare for your first powerlifting meet:

Apply to join my “Platform-Ready Blueprint” and become a case study. We’ll work with you 1-on-1 to show you how to add up to 200 lbs to your total and compete in a powerlifting meet with less than 5 hours per week in the gym.

It takes less than 60 seconds to apply HERE in order to find out more information and see if you’d be a good fit.

The 8-Week Plateau Breaker: Fixing Shoulder Injuries and Adding 60+ lbs to a Bench Press PR