Anyone familiar with myself or my team will know George. He's easily recognisable (outside of his twin who looks just like him) and one of the friendliest blokes you'll ever have the pleasure of meeting. I've been working with him for a total of nearly 3ish years now. To say his training programs and protocols have evolved would be selling it short. George started off as a 66kg lifter and after enough convincing, we got him into the 74s. Within his first year of competing in the 74s, he snuck his way into the bronze position at last year's APU Nationals. No easy feat, but with some phenomenal gameday handling by Victor Liu and enough data to work with to create a "perfect" peak, we got him there.
All this was blown up and thrown to the wind by the end of last year & start of this year. Why? Cause good ol' George got into medical school like the smart lad he is. So as many of you are reading this, hopefully, you know how hectic med school is because when George first told me his contact hours and workload, my first thought was "how are you even going to train?", and at the same time, it was incredibly exciting. We had to figure out new ways to train and break the mould of what is the base of our typical powerlifting program. We went from a pretty normal emerging strategies style program to something that still uses ES at its core, but unique in that it was incredibly flexible.
Here is what George's program used to look like:
Pretty basic right? But it worked for him. And we went from that, to this:
As you can see, there are quite a lot of key differences. One being that he was on a 4 day microcycle to a 7 day microcycle. The other difference with that is in his old program, his microcycle was considered 1 week whereas in the new one, it is 2 weeks. Meaning he completes 7 training sessions within 14 days vs the old method of completing 4 training sessions in 7 days. With the new microcycle, I let George choose when he could / wanted to train as long as he managed to complete all 7 sessions within the stipulated 14 days (2 Weeks).
The main reason for changing the microcycle time and training frequency was to allow more flexibility in an already externally charged lifestyle. George is very sociable and has an already packed schedule so this gave him more allowance with his time.
The format with his old program would go SB / BD / SB / BD, and in his new program: SB / BD / B / SBD / SB / DB / B. A key consideration while constructing the block was his benchpress frequency due to the fact that in his old programs, he would have clocked in 8 bench sessions within 14 days, whereas with the new format he would only clock in 7. With that in mind, we increased the overall volume and spread it across the 7 days while doubling up on Day 3 with both Tempo Benchpress and the Spoto Press. Squat and deadlifts would lose one session each within 14 days, clocking in only 3 sessions of each respective lift in each microcycle of 14 days. In previous training blocks with the new format, we would have a higher intensity day, a higher volume day, and a skill based day. Coming into prep, we decided against this due to the lower exposure to top end work and doubled up on higher intensities and reducing the overall volume. Opting instead to have more singles within the microcycle to ensure we are getting enough practice as this prep was only 2 microcycles long (4 weeks).
With those things in mind, we also knew that accessories weren't the highest of priorities but they are still important so we shifted all that work towards Day 7 to ensure that all other sessions, the focus was on the main lifts and we would have the least amount of DOMs and fatigue interference.
What's most interesting about this prep was that despite catching a flu 1 week out, George was still by far at the strongest he's ever been. Smarter weight selection and fatigue management probably would have led to a better result, but it was a reminder that we have to practice what we preach and take what's there on the day and not what we want. With how we were capping off the block - missed top single squat and a misload on deadlift taper single which ended up being too heavy and missing - we still put together an outstanding performance. We nailed the same weight he missed (225kg) his squat on for his third attempt at about an RPE 9, followed by a 2.5kg PB on bench press (145kg), and an equal PR on deadlifts (267.5kg) which he grinded for his third at last year's APU Nationals but moved it at an RPE 9 this time round; while holding position much better.
The few things we noted that can be improved on would be his taper protocols and not having an SBD day so close to comp; rather splitting it into SB + BD a day earlier as to ensure a bit better recovery and fatigue management going into competition. We also did find that the microcycle was TOO flexible so we will trial having certain sessions prescribed for set days within the micro (e.g. Day 1 on Monday & Day 4 on the following Monday). Aside from that, we managed to put together a prep that was accommodating of his lifestyle while getting him to his peak performance. 12 Weeks out now to APU NSW States!
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