As much as I beat myself up, I am definitely making headway into keeping my body whole. A couple of years ago just getting out of bed hurt and that's not hyperbole. And although my programming has been lacking some consistency as of late, my training has not. It's been really difficult finding the right balance.
For most of my competitive powerlifting career I have implemented conjugate programming. For a lot of the last decade I have also used 5/3/1. The biggest differences between the two in my opinion is volume or at least, how it is distributed.
What I have noticed with conjugate is that even though the training can be heavier on max days, I feel less beat up. With conjugate you are not getting a lot of volume from the big lifts on max effort days. Meanwhile with 5/3/1 you can accumulate a lot of volume between warm up, work, and supplemental sets.
With 5/3/1 I always follow everthing to the letter including the warm up sets. What I am starting to learn between my time in conjugate and 5/3/1 is that which ever I use, I have to get to my work sets as economically as possible. I don't need sets of 10's, 5's, 3 or whatever. I just need to be warmed up and prepared to handle my work set.
Doing sets of 5's with sub max weight on my way up is just putting my strain on my body that it doesn't want. It needs the stimulation from top sets without all the volume from the others. I just don't need that much foreplay with my training. Whether it's conjugate or 5/3/1, just get to that top set and give it everything
Now there is a fair amount of volume with conjugate on the dynamic effort days, however, it is eparated from the max effort days. Aha, perhaps if I want to follow 5/3/1 I could separate my supplemental work sets by doing them on a different day.
For me, I like the consistency of exercises with 5/3/1 as opposed to conjugage--my first love. With the mileage on my body, I can't afford to play around with too many exercises. I just might have figured out the perfect comprimise.
Next up, figuring out assistance.
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