Sean Hyson

I mentioned in a post or two last fall that I was following a new program and trying to get back on the track of getting progressively stronger. This week, that three-month process comes to a head—it’s testing week.

And it’s off to a hell of a start. I power cleaned 240 yesterday, setting a huge PR, and squatted 405, tying my all-time best* (I’ll explain this asterisk later.) I had messed around with hang cleans and snatches in the past, but I’m not a trained Olympic lifter, and I was never sure of my form. I also never had access to bumper plates or the kind of gym that was conducive to O lifting, so I eventually did away with those exercises. On the suggestion of my friend, the Angry Coach from elitefts.com, I decided to dedicate myself to learning the basic power clean and making it a regular part of my workouts.

Why clean? It’s a good extension of your warm-up before squatting or deadlifting, and it’s a great total-body strength challenge. I’m not looking to play football at age 30, but I like training like an athlete, and doing something a little unconventional in a public gym. The clean satisfies both of those needs.

Anyway, I didn’t know what to expect for a max on the clean, as I never used more than 160 pounds in training. To suddenly heave up 80 more pounds than I’d touched on that lift in years was thrilling… shocking even. And it proves the value of training with submaximal weights. Had I been going for a new 5RM every week, I never would have gotten to 240.

For the squat, I was a little disappointed at first, but looking back I think it was right where it should be. I’ll explain the asterisk. When I did my 12-week transformation two years ago, I squatted 405 pretty smoothly by the end of the program. Yesterday, it was a slow grind to the finish (and I’m hurting pretty bad for it today). However, this time I wasn’t wearing a belt. That makes a difference. The only thing holding my spine together was my abs. I was also in a commercial gym rather than a hardcore athletic facility surrounded by friends cheering me on. Some guidos even walked up to the squat rack next to me and started curling! This was not the atmosphere I wanted as I concentrated on working up to four plates. Of course, this is no excuse, but I do believe that if I had had a bigger cheering section and was a little fresher (had I not just cleaned prior), i might have been good for five more pounds. Still, as a result of some mistakes I’d made in my training over the past year, I hadn’t squatted nearly that much in a while, and to rejoin the 400 club felt great. No excuses, it was a good outing, and I’ll top it in another 12 weeks. No doubt about it.

I haven’t written much about the program I’ve followed because it’s the brainchild of the Angry Coach and, honestly, I’d like to see him take a little more credit for it and do more to publicize it. It really turned things around for me. I’ll share it with you in broad strokes here so you have an idea of what I was doing.

It’s all based on Prilepin’s chart. To make a long story short, there was a Soviet sports scientist named Prilepin who studied lifters. After amassing a lot of research on a large number of athletes, he determined which set and rep schemes yielded the best results according to particular percentages of the lifter’s one-rep max. For example, at 60% of your max, it was decided that you’d need to do three to six sets of three to six reps, or roughly 18–30 total reps. Below is the chart in its entirety.

Percentage     Reps/Sets     Optimal     Total Range

55–65                 3–6              24             18–30
70–80                 3–6              18             12–24
80–90                 2–4              15             10–20
90+                       1–2              4               10 

I used the chart for every main lift. In my case, this was the clean, squat, bench press, deadlift, and military press. I started with 50% of my max (I conservatively estimated my best for each lift) and aimed for 30 total reps. As a relatively inexperienced, weaker guy, I aimed for the high end of the chart because I needed to build more work capacity (conditioning) and ingrain good form on each lift. In accordance with the chart, I chose five sets of six to hit the 30 total reps I needed. I increased the weight by five percent each week while still hitting 30 reps. This went on until I was at 70% of my max. At that point, I was aiming for 24 total reps and doing four sets of six. You can probably see how it went from there. The high end of the total rep range was my goal for the first several weeks, and then as the weights got heavy I aimed for the low end or the “optimal” number. Otherwise, there was no real guess work. I knew what I had to lift, but how I got there wasn’t set in stone. If I needed an extra set to get to the rep number I wanted, I took it. As long as I stayed in the prescribed set/rep range, I was following the program.

I’ll delve deeper into how all this worked in a later post, but I wanted to shed a little light on a system that’s done great things for me. As with Jim Wendler’s landmark 5/3/1 program, the idea is to start too light, progress gradually, and then set big PR’s. I’ll share how the rest of my test week goes next time.