I would sit down with a yellow legal pad and make a little chart showing how many weeks I had left to the meet. Then Id start working backwards from there.
10 weeks?
okay, basically the last week doesnt count because its the meet week and its not a training week. So really you have 9 training weeks to play with
If you were doing sheiko type stuff, its usually based on 4 week cycles. So youd probably take a 4 week prep cycle and then a 4 week peaking cycle and youd just add a week to the prep cycle.
The sheiko stuff pretty much follows the standard russian ideas of "3 hard weeks then an easier week" so instead youd have 4 weeks then the easy week as far as your 5 week prep cycle
of course the sheiko "easy" weeks arent that easy, lol. When I did my first sheiko I did 3 weeks as written and then the 4th week I REALLY backed way off for recovery then I went into a short peaking phase
with 10 weeks id probably do this
1-4 sheiko prep...possibly adding a few heavier attempts the last week to see how I feel
5 deload week
6-10 peaking cycle leading up to week 10 which is meet week
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right now I am training for a bench meet on mar 15th....I started training the first week of the year so I had 11 weeks. That gives me two 4 week phases and one 3 week phase
so I am finishing up week 2 of the 3 week phase now and believe it or not I am just doing inclines and floor press, db press, front laterals etc...working on my weak spot for bench which is my front delts.
week 4-7 will be some form of modified sheiko for bench only. Who knows I may even do bench on M,W,F,Sat...or maybe just 3x per week....we'll see. Either way week 7 will be a slight deload
then weeks 8-11 will be some peaking routine which I havent decided on yet.
My thinking is that early on you work on weaknesses and this is when youd use more variety etc. As the meet gets nearer your training gets more specific. Some of the variety starts dropping out and its a lot of quality reps with the bench or big 3 or whatever. Probably the last 2-3 weeks you drop most assistance as you start dropping volume and cranking intensity to peak for the meet.
so basically as the weeks go by, this is the overall pattern
less specific----> more specific
more volume----> less volume
less intensity----> more intensity
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of course there are as many approaches as there are people willing to try them. With, say, 10 weeks to go, you could simply do a 5x5 type workout for 3 weeks and then run a peaking program such as this one
http://web.archive.org/web/200604271...reComrade.html
or do 5x5 or whatever for 6 weeks then use this little 3 week peaking phase..the top one on the page
http://www.impulseadventure.com/weights/bench-rick.html if I did that one id make the last week of the 5x5 part a pretty easy week so as to start the peaking phase fresh.
remember that peaking is all about max recovery and freshness. its fine to overload and get majorly fatigued etc while in a heavy TRAINING period....but peaking is more about recovering fully and letting all of the bodys resources be used for the SPECIFIC act of your competitive lifts. The peaking workotus start to have the feel of an actual meet
I also dont believe in doing the same lift year round. I believe you get into overuse and pattern overload etc. So lets say I had a "pet" 9 week bench routine. You can bet that I wouldnt be doign a ton of regular benching in the weeks prior to that. Id be doing floor press, decline, dbells, boards, just whatever else I could do to gain or maintain strength without doing actual benches. When I start my bench routine I dont want to ALREADY be burnt out on bench from doign it for the previous 12 weeks or whatever.
Same for squats or deads. If I were going to a some conventional dead program id probably so sumos or somethign else in the weeks before I started the actual dead routine
Linear Mode
