dePaljas’s BodyBlog

Since I had finished my previous program, built around a coan cycle for squat, deadlift and benchpress (see results here), I decided to build a new one. Instead of picking one of the more popular programs, I set up a list of requirements and started building a custom program. There requirements were:

• Most emphasis on legs and back, medium emphasis on chest and shoulders, least emphasis on arms;
• Emphasis on compounds like squats, deadlift, benchpress and military press;
• Strict rest in between sets of the same exercise;
• Hybrid of power and volume training;
• Workouts should not be longer than 1h20m;
• The program starts relatively light, and builds up until slightly over current personal records.

Here is what I did to meet these requirements. I divided muscle groups as follows:

• P1: legs, back;
• P2: shoulders, chest;
• P3: biceps, triceps.

Each workout will contain exercises for a P1, P2 and P3, resulting in a two split, since there are two muscle groups in each P. So:

• Day 1: legs, chest, biceps;
• Day 2: back, shoudlers, triceps.

I classified exercises into main (M) and assist (A). For each:

• P1, I assign 1 M and 2 As;
• P2, I assign 1 M and 1 A;
• P3, I assign 1 A.

This results in 6 exercises per workout. For an M exercise, I will do 5×5, for an A 3×12. To keep some variation in the exercises performed, I set up a 3rd and 4th day similar to day 1 and 2, only with (mostly) different exercises.

I took my current (estimated) 5RMs and 12RMs. Since these were usually performed rather isolated instead of in sequence of 5 sets, I cut off 5% to make it more realistic that I was able to perform them in such sequence, rather than just a one-hit-wonder. Then, I took the following multipliers to build up weight over time:

0.9, 0.95, 1, 1.025, 1.05, 1.075, 1.1

This resulted in the following program (see here):

The Ts (T1, T2, …) refer to the multipliers. The weights in the matrix are a result of the multiplication. So what you see in the program is an outline for 7×4 = 28 workouts.