What program are you currently following and what do you have planned for 2023?

I'm finishing the last week of a 9 week programme written by one of Joe DeFranco's long time collaborators, James Smith.

It was a 4 day programme, 2 upper, 2 lower.

All days had a main lift, and over the 9 weeks it used Louis Simmons wave periodisation, a week of 3s, week of 2s, week of 1s and then start over. Each time back at the relevant rep range it was usually possible to add weight. I made progress on all lifts. My bench and press are back to about 95% of all time best, my squat and deadlift further to go.

Aside form the main lift the programme used a different modality for 3 weeks at a time. The first three weeks we did reverse order (Assistance first, main lift last), the second three weeks we did escalating density training for the assistance, the last three weeks we've been doing tempo changes mid set on some of the assistance. All the changing feels like it's very geared towards the short attention span of much of the audience, but either way I've made progress and feel good, so I'm happy.

On the topic of programming... I've been thinking recently how similar what I'm doing now is to the 5/3/1 programming I did about ten years ago, in terms of ethos, exercise selection and program lay-out... It's actually pretty uncanny.

Why would Jim Wendler's programming look so much like what Joe DeFranco is offering? I suppose there's a few reasons... (1) There's only so many ways to skin a cat, if you assume they have both reached the same conclusions to the same problems, and (2) Mutual influence / cross pollination of ideas. Wendler does credit DeFranco in his books, and I'm pretty sure the opposite is true as well.

To give an example of what I mean by similarities, this is based on the past year-

• Mobility movements non negotiable in the warm-up
• Box jumps or power movements like med ball chest pass / throws / slams in the warm-up as primers, emphasis on 'quality of movement' versus weight moved, no emphasis on jumping as high as an athlete might, just trying to be explosive and do the movement well
• Main lift for Wendler is always a barbell movement, admittedly DeFranco does sometimes program single leg movements as a main lift in a workout, on lower days anyway, but usually for both there is a key lift for the day
• Assistance work is always hypertrophy focused, and although the volume varies radically the Wendler of 10 years ago sounds a lot like the DeFranco of today, with an emphasis on band pull-aparts, face-pulls and shoulder health

Wendler made the above structure the definitive lay-out of most 5/3/1 templates, in 5/3/1 Forever. Not all DeFranco programmes I've done via him follow that dogmatically, but overall I'd say they're very close in approach.

What are the differences?

DeFranco uses a LOT more exercise and protocol variation, whereas Wendler is more focused on a set selection that he wants to see progress on. I probably fall somewhere in between. I think variation prevents injury / niggles and keeps training fresh, but at times I have felt like DeFranco injects novelty only because there is a vocal sub-set of his customer base who demand / expect it.

I also feel like DeFranco has moved further away from a pure strength focus. I've done cycles where the main lift on lower body days was a paused bulgarian split squat and I'd be lying if I said I felt it had not caused me to regress compared to having a bilateral barbell lift in its place.

Makes me want to check out what Wendler is currently advocating on his forum.

In other news, tweaked my back earlier in the week doing a heavy set of hand supported single leg RDLs, of all things. I'm a bit annoyed at myself for not taking the SLRDL seriously enough. It was with a 27.5kg DB, my third set of 10, and although I don't think my form was to blame my load management was obviously off for they day and the weight was too heavy, my body too cold. I also think I have just had something waiting in my low back / SI joint for some time... I can feel it in my deadlifts, I'm about 30kg off my PR from about 2 years ago, so I guess this was in the mail for some time. Been taking ibuprofen and carried on training, doing what I can. A lot of inflammation but I'm a little better every day. If I was a betting man I'd say I'll be back to normal in a few weeks. The one benefit of being older and lifting, I've been here before and know it will likely pass, whereas when I was 25 I would have been practically hanging up my lifting belt....

An update on my programming.

I'm on the second week of a 12 week Joe DeFranco programme called "Built Different" (Very American name), which is a re-written version of a programme from him called "Rebuilt" which is designed to be a 'corrective' / therepeutic programme that people would do to get away from barbell training and niggling injuries.

Ironically, as I posted in another thread, I managed to hurt my lower back on it last week, on the first lower body day, by not warming up properly before I did some heavy-ish sets of single leg RDLs.

In the past week I've progressed really well back towards normality, after an initial slow start. From the point of view of where I am now, this appears to be a classic acute back injury that resolves in 4-6 weeks. What I'm finding now, a week on, is that I have some pain and discomfort during the night and for about 2 hours after waking, but once the spine is upright again and less swollen with fluid from the night time, I'm feeling pretty normal. I can touch my toes again today so mobility returning, the inflammation and loss of ROM is receding. I've dialled way back on the ibuprofen I was taking. I think largely all of this is just the healing process and the relatively minor nature of whatever happened to me, but I should also mention I was following doing a lot of bird dogs, cat-camels and planks since this happened... The elements of the Stuart McGill approach to back injuries that I've always found therepeutic.

Ironically though I haven't missed much of the DeFranco programme as it's quite mild mannered and I've had a relatively normal series of workouts even with the back episode.

It's push, pull, lower and a full body day, all using a mixture of bodyweight, DBs and machines... No barbells. In many respects it's funny, it's almost as if it was written for me right now, because it contains many elements that are considered beneficial for rehab/prehab of back injuries, including one sided suitcase carries, a lot of stretching of the hip flexors, relatively light loading on lower body days etc.

Yeah wouldn't disagree.

All DeFranco's programming these days is a bit like this but on this specific program he totally omits the barbell.

On all his stuff now he uses a lot of modifiers for exercises that keep mechanical tension high but mean load is lower... Long eccentrics, mid set tempo changes, pauses, 1.5 rep sets and just plain higher reps... All of them mean lighter weights.

I think that's easier on the body BUT objectively I think for an injury free person who recovers well the evidence is probably that it's less effective than just progressively loading heavy straight sets.

These days though DeFrancos approach just feels more forgiving most of the time... He does still sprinkle in heavier and higher intensity barbell stuff here and there.

I do think there's something smart about cycling in and out straight barbell work, even if it means using speciality bars other times not unilateral or BW or DB substitutes. I don't think it is just about load reduction, I think it's smart to give the joints a break from being put through the same angles year in year out, based on where your hands are, where the bar always sits etc

So reducing load but keeping the flat bench as you normally would is less of a break than doing Swiss bar for a cycle, IMO.

If I could go back 15 years at the very least I would have varied my bench grip width a lot more than I did, and I wouldn't have almost exclusively low bar back squatted for as long as I did.

I did get a lot out of conjugate style training, which is barbell-centric and does obviously cycle a lot of variations. I think for longevity there's something to a conjugate approach.. If I could go back what I would probably address is that I was still doing 10 sets of straight bar bench and 10 sets of low bar squats just from my dynamic days alone. If I had cycled in phases doing floor presses, trap bar deads or whatever on the dynamic days that would have been even better. But of course depends what you're doing the program for, someone focusing on big 3 lifts might not want to do that.

OK, so yes the original WS4SB trilogy are still great programs and they have dynamic days.

To be honest, I usually did not do the dynamic days, I did the "washed up meathead" template where you do ME upper, ME lower, hypertrophy upper and then fourth day of "your choice" / some conditioning.

I felt like the dynamic days the way Joe set them up were just more aimed at field sports athletes, I wasn't interested.

I suggest you check out some of his recent podcasts though, episode 407 goes through how he programmes jumps, throws and power for over 35s lifters. Basically, he puts 3 sets of throws / slams in the warm up for upper body, and 3 sets of jumps in lower body. Worth listening to.

The WS4SB is almost perfect programming though, really has it all... Strength progression on main lifts... Also tonnes of hypertrophy work. And decent variation, switching things up every several weeks.

The Forever Strong is paid programming delivered via the Train Heroic app.

It's not one program (like WS4SB, for example), it changes over time, usually every 12 weeks.

From the top of my head, we've done maybe 4-5 programs at this stage.

They've varied between 3-4 days training, and usually have been 'push/pull/legs' and then if there was a fourth day that was either a rehab/recovery type day, or it was a full body day.

Obviously because it's been several different programs, the details of what the Lower days look like depends on the specific program but in general they have been something like-

-Mobility stuff at the beginning

-Some kind of 2 or 3 exercise circuit to warm-up, using things like banded leg extensions and leg curls, hip bridges, DB RDLs, single leg exercises... Just a way to get a sweat going

-Main lift has sometimes been a deadlift or a squat variation of your choice, and usually 3-4 sets, and often the last set might be some kind of max reps or max effort set. But on at least 2 of the programs the main lift has been DB bulgarian split squats, going heavy, like 3-5 reps...

-Supplementary work has been what you'd expect... Hip bridges, RDLs, back extensions, leg curls... Often super-sets

If you've been following DeFranco for a while you probably know that his outlook these days is that there are no essential exercises, so if straight bar deadlifts are consistently messing you up then I think he would probably note that you could pull off blocks, or do trap bar deads, or whatever else. The point in his programming is not to increase your deadlift max, he would probably say the point is just to have a main lift that's glute, hamstring and low-back focused and pick one you can put in a good effort on.

Been continuing to run the Joe DeFranco / James Smith programming from Team Forever Strong.

Last program, just finishing up, was an upper, lower, upper plus 'summer challenges' that were basically outdoor conditioning workouts.

Some progress on bench 1rm but probably regressed a little on my front squat 1rm. Pull-up numbers jumped up.

Overall reasonably happy, I've learned that you can rarely make all the numbers go up all the time. You have to pick your priorities.

If numbers are going down across the board, or in the majority, that's a red flag for me BTW. You don't have to be arbitrarily assigning importance to a given set of lifts, it's more that if you're getting weaker in several ears then it's probably a bad sign, unless there's some really specific circumstances where it's OK (Like being a very large powerlifter who wants to go in a complete different direction with their training, losing body mass, lifts dropping etc But developing greater all-around fitness, more relative strength etc.).

There's some discontent in the TFS online group at the moment because errors in the programming have been appearing, causing people to have to query what is correct in a given workout and what might be an error. It's usually minor stuff - a set too much here, lack of clarity on whether it's a close grip bench vs regular bench - stuff like that, but overall there's a little bit of a sense that no one is at the helm / regularly checking in.

I know the week after next we're doing a three week transitional programme that is based around the idea of super high volume. Almost like a challenge rather than a programme.

After the three week transitional program there's a 'summer challenge'. Again, I'll take a look at what it is, because we can see the upcoming programming a week in advance, but if it doesn't float my boat then I might go on pause for a few months, and do something like a basic upper / lower.