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The original was posted on /r/weightroom by /u/OGPuffin on 2023-12-19 01:51:28.
TLDR: Got depressed and skinny during COVID, came back to the gym after getting life sorted out and am now less skinny.
My background: 28M 5'6". I was an athlete growing up, as well as through high school and college. Mostly I swam (butterfly, IM), along with sports-specific lifting and calisthenics, and also dabbled in wrestling and Judo. Injuries and grad school meant I stopped competing, but I stayed pretty active through general lifting, running, hiking, and eventually coming back to martial arts. Pre-covid, I was working an active job, hiking regularly, swimming, and grappling, and was generally pretty happy with my fitness.
Then came the pandemic.... Work was off and on, schedules were weird, life was weird, and I dropped from ~170 to 148lbs. Things started to even out in life last year, and I was able to restart lifting and grappling.
9/22 stats (all in pounds):
BW - 150
Squat - 135 x 5
Deadlift - 95 x 5
Bench - 95 x 5
OHP - 50 x 5
12/23 stats:
BW - 168Squat - 315 x 5 (2 sets)
Deadlift - 325 x 3 (3 sets)
Bench - 185 x 3 (2 sets)
OHP - 135 x 3 (2 sets)
For the first two months or so, I basically just ran stronglifts 5x5 to get myself readjusted to lifting weights again, and to try and build the habits back after being a sad potato for the previous 2 years. In December, I shifted to running a program based on the standard 5/3/1 template, 4x per week, with a few tweaks.
Jan - July: I started out running BBB pretty much as-written, except for the accessory work. Instead of just doing a bunch of pullups and dips, I incorporated a few different bodybuilding exercises to keep things a little less 'boring', a la Bromley's Bullmastiff and Jeff Nippard's Powerbuilding. I generally organized these as upper-lower days, with the accessory back work happening on the upper days and abs on lower body days. Most days, this would mean 3-4 accessory exercises. I generally managed to get this, a warm-up, and a cool down done in about 60-75mins.
July-Nov: BBB started getting stale, and I began to plateau on some of the main lifts, as well as starting to feel like my conditioning really needed some attention (BW peaked around 175lbs at the end of July). So, I switched to a caloric deficit and began running a variation of of 5's pro that included 3-5 additional sets at the last or second to last weight, plus some additional sets on the main lifts, keeping the bodybuilding accessories, while incorporating more cardio (grappling, running, hiking) outside the gym. For the main lifts, that meant that the general pattern looked like (Week 2 example): 5@75%, 5@80%, 2-3x5@ 85%, 1-2x5@75%. I found that this still gave enough volume to feel like I was doing something, without it being completely crushing. Towards the end of the cut, I further reduced the main lift volumes to be only 1-2 extra sets, as fatigue was really starting to get to me.
Dec: I finished the cut around 165, then bumped back up to maintenance at the beginning of November, and am currently holding between 166-168, with the lifts listed above being what I managed last week.
Summary: Honestly, I feel like this went really well. I'm feeling much stronger and healthier than I have since pre-pandemic, and am really looking forward to seeing just how much more I can build this coming year. I will echo just about everyone's thoughts about 5/3/1, which is that I found the base version to not be nearly enough volume as-written, so I generally added 2-3 top sets and 1 or 2 back-off sets after I finished the 5/3/1 portion (which, I suppose basically means that I was treating the 5/3/1 sequence as a warm-up?). I also found other programs' accessory recommendations to be a lot more helpful, so I tended to look elsewhere to round out each day.
What's next: One of the things that I really appreciated about the program, as I was just getting back into the gym was the focus on a training max, and how the program walked you through scaling the weekly work off of that. It was really helpful to be able to scale off a 3 or 5 RM, as opposed to feeling like I *had* to test my 1RM every x number of months to know how to scale. So, I'm going to keep that idea while moving away from the specific programs that Wendler provides.
I found that the top sets of OHP and Bench began to aggravate some old injury areas toward the end of each cycle, so I'm planning to keep the wave progression on an overall powerbuilding type structure, but shift down to the 70-85% weight range for 8-12 reps on the upper body lifts, while continuing lower body work in the 80-90% range for 5-8 reps. I'm currently planning to begin another muscle gain phase from Jan-March, with a bodyweight goal of 180, then cut down to about 170 and assess where to go from there.