The good news is that after spending a weekend at Wendler's (blog to follow soon), I was able to max on the squat, deadlift, and bench and woke up pain-free the next morning. The bad news is that when I resumed my normal training on Monday, the nagging thoracic issues I have been battling returned.
It's funny because I had been suspecting my assistance work had more to do with my pain issues than the actual big three lifts themselves. In the back of my mind, I knew this weekend at Wendler's was going to answer this question for me one way or another.
Now I have made some improvements with my back, but I seemed to have hit a plateau. So with this weekend's revelations, I'm not sure what to do next. If assistance work is aggravating my back I have two choices. The first is, I can spite myself and stick with my current plan, or the other would be overhauling my training to where's there's no assistance (then over time carefully and methodically add exercises back).
This really sucks because I have enjoyed the conjugate plan I have been running for the past two months. But dealing with nagging pain is just no way to go through life. Looks like I'll be exploring some volume-based programming options for the squat, deadlift, and bench. Oh yeah, and I also need to dig deeper into resolving this thoracic issue as working around it is a temporary fix, not a solution.
In the grand scheme of things, if this is my worst problem, I'm doing ok. Guess it's back to the drawing board I go.
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