Squatting Ideas.

Had some really good ideas tonight.

I have been thinking that I might want to change my thursdays. Chaos and pain squat has helped me gain some serious mental toughness, some confidence under heavy ass weight, and taught me how to handle a workout with a ton of sets. HOWEVER, I honestly don't know how much strength it is building. Personally, I have always seen my greatest gains with 5/3/1 - doing squats for a lot of reps, and pushing CRAZY hard has always seemed to make my legs strongest. Don't get me wrong, I'm not sad that I did the C&P, because I think it taught me a lot, and I am going to finish out this 9 week cycle with it. BUT The amount of time and pain put into this style of training just doesn't seem to be worth the limited strength gains I get from it. And, I had a cool idea that I think I might try next cycle.

Right now, I am doing 5 x 5 squats on monday, building up to 265. After Christmas, I was planning on dropping back to 225, but upping the reps back up to 5 x 10. HOWEVER, this would be insanely hard, and time consuming, blah blah blah.

SO, here's the idea. Instead of Chaos and Pain squat on thursday, I will do high volume squats, increasing the weight and dropping the reps over the course of 9 weeks so that I start with just a ton of muscle and strength building volume, and then slowly hone that new strength/muscle toward the end of the cycle. So it would look something like this:

5 x 10 squats - difficult, but not all out, keep form nice
5 x 10 squats - up the weight, push harder
5 x 8 squats - more weight than last week, but should be solid
5 x 8 - really push
5 x 6 - etc
5 x 6
5 x 4
5 x 4
5 x 2

I think this will be awesome for me for a few reasons. First, I know my body responds really well to high volume stuff, and weeks 1 - 6 all fall into this category. Second, I still will have quite a bit of heavy stuff in those last three weeks, and will be primed to hit a heavy single on a 10th week, so I will still get practice under heavy ass weight. and Third, it allows me to self regulate - the first, third, fifth, seventh week can work as sort of "feeler" weeks, where I work hard but don't kill myself, and then I can make a well educated jump the next week and REALLY push myself close to my limit. AND, on any given "first" week, I could easily repeat the weight from the week before, or even drop lower in order to get in some extra recovery/technique practice.

Bottom line, I think this type of training will be tons of fun, REALLY work well for me, and will mentally and physically prime me to hit PR squats on those 10th weeks when I decide to max out. Plus,
it will open up a slot for a new exercise on mondays after speed deads (good mornings, more front squats, stiff leg deads?), AND I will still get some heavy squat practice as long as I keep heavy pause squatting on saturday. Which I will do cause it's awesome.

Anyways, that's the idea and I guess the plan. Gonna finish out these last 6 weeks as planned, and then make these changes and hopefully have a ton of fun and get really fucking strong. I'm excited.