8 Week Strength Cycle

From Jason…

Hey everybody, as your (temporary) new programming wizard, I wanted to point a few things out as we start this new cycle, particularly with regards to the lifting.

– The percentages we are using are going off of a training max. This training max is defined as 90% of your current 1RM. If you don’t have a 1RM for a given lift, your trainer should have you perform a 1RM/3RM/5RM on that lift this week so that you can continue with the cycle in the following weeks. Use calculators!
– The last set of each lifting session is defined as “5+” or “3+” or “1+”. This means that you do at least 5 or 3 or 1 of the given exercise, and then continue on with the set to do as many as possible until failure/almost failure. For press and bench press going to failure is probably ok, but for DL and squat it’s better to leave one in the tank especially if form is starting to break down. As an example, here’s how tomorrow’s back squats would go if your 1RM was 200#:

Training max = 90% of 200 = 180#

– warm up sets at your discretion
– 1 set of 5 at 65% of training max = 130#
– 1 set of 5 at 75% of training max = 150#
– 1 set of 5+ at 85% of training max = 170#

One last point – documentation is REALLY important for this entire cycle. If you always forgets your lifts, write them down on a piece of paper that we can keep at the gym! The only numbers you need to know are the training max numbers, but they’re really important for this to work right. If you can prepare ahead of time and know the weights you’ll be using for each set that’d save you and the trainers a lot of time. It might seem a bit complicated at first, but the format stays pretty similar throughout the cycle so once we get past the first week or so it’ll be easy. Please click this link and click File, Save As to download the sheet to calculate your own lift amounts.

If anybody has comments/questions/etc about what we’re doing over this cycle, feel free to email me at jason@crossfitcharlottesville.com.