How To Write your Own Powerlifting Training Program

Conor and I recently discussed at length, “How To Write Your Own Training Program” on the Odyssey Podcast. For brevity’s sake, I have decided to put on paper the bulk of concepts discussed for those of you who don’t have the time (or patience) to listen to Conor and I waffle for nearly 2 hours…

Oftentimes, the way in which you formulate training will be based on an overarching worldview or philosophy. You might be someone who thinks hard work trumps all other factors (as you sip on your tasty pre-workout drink and read an article on how to best spend your recreational lifting time, on your iPhone…). I’ll do my best to outline below the philosophies that guide our decision making as we look to formulate training for the athletes we work with.

Why “Odyssey”?

“A long and eventful journey or experience” is how Oxford Languages defines the word Odyssey. To us, this word encompasses everything, the good, the bad, the indifferent and celebrates it for what it is, a long and eventful journey on the road to self-improvement. Getting stronger and being physically active is one of the most important things you can do for your health and at baseline, every single time we step into the gym or out into the world and lift a weight or put one foot in front of the other we’re moving in the direction of a long, healthy and fulfilling life.

Powerlifting further embodies an “Odyssey”. Naturally, the goal in powerlifting is simply to lift the most weight in the disciplines of the back squat, bench press and deadlift through a particular ruleset as possible. Achieving the peak of your abilities in powerlifting is a process that takes no less than 20/30 years. It’s reasonable to expect that over that period of time you will experience the lowest lows, the highest highs and everything in between. Our job is to make the sum of this experience as enjoyable as possible. This outlines one of our core philosophies under Odyssey Strength:

Individualization is everywhere…

There are no limitations to how much you can look to individualize the training process. Of course you have the typical things people talk about;
How many days can you train?; How long can you spend in the gym for each training session?; Is there a goal/event you’re working towards?
We take a bottom-up, athlete-centric approach and look to delve deeper when it comes to individualization. Firstly, what do we mean by individualization and how do we achieve it?
Individualization is the iterative optimization of an individual’s training through observations made by tracking training related data. With individualization being our top priority our training is structured in a bottom-up manner.

Bottom-up vs Top-down

A top-down approach is one where you run a training cycle of a predetermined length (usually 12-16 week) where the training protocol was decided ahead of time.

A bottom-up approach is one where the long term plan emerges from short term trialing and testing.

The shortest repeating unit of training is a microcycle, and a number of microcycles stringed together is generally referred to as a block or mesocycle, with a number of blocks being referred to as a training cycle, or macrocycle.

A top-down approach will generally include changes in each microcycle in an effort to build momentum into the training and instill a sense of weekly improvement in the athlete.

A bottom-up approach will see the microcycle remain static or unchanged over the course of a block with the view of improving the signal to noise ratio for adaptation.

Well which is better?

They’re just different. Once upon a time I would’ve demonized a top-down approach and the claims of individualization that coaches who employ this approach can make, but with a few more years of experience I’ve realized that the “best” approach is somewhere in the middle*. You can absolutely present an effective training stimulus to an athlete with a top-down approach, but you’re limited in understanding what makes that training particularly effective due to the noisy nature of a lengthy period of training that includes a lot of change. A bottom-up approach will allow you to better focus on the level of response or adaptation to a particular stimulus and also understand the number of exposures needed to reach a peak in levels of adaptation made. Furthermore, when in a competition preparation phase, a bottom-up approach will allow you to selectively employ a top-down approach for the duration of “prep” using the things you’ve learned through past exploration and development phases.

*Being honest here matters. Running a hands off non-athlete centric training approach will not allow you to make meaningful individualizations.

So what are we actually looking to individualize?

In short, everything. However, this is a monumental task, one that requires year and years of trial and error and sometimes due to the often random nature of humans, a major change in someone’s life circumstances can see years of training data invalidated overnight. It really is worth driving home the sheer scale of this task in an effort to illustrate how important one particular (often overlooked or under considered) training variable is:

Enjoyment

As we outlined above, powerlifting is a multi-decade commitment if you’re serious about achieving the upper limitations of your potential, so from a coaching perspective the goal is very simple; Keep the athlete training, for a very long time. One of the best ways to do this is to consider enjoyment at every level of the training process. Sometimes it may be better to choose something that on paper seems less optimal for the sake of athlete preference. One example of where this might be necessary is where an athlete is going through a particularly stressful life event. Giving them the beltless high bar 10’s that they love doing is probably going to elicit better results than the heavy triples you had earmarked, (even if they’re relatively close to competition) because at the end of the day;

Something is ALWAYS better than nothing.

I’ll spare you an endless bullet list and summarize this by saying, there is limitless potential to optimize for athlete enjoyment/preference.

Momentum in training

When considering the intangible that is training momentum, I think back to ~2015 when I was first learning how to formulate powerlifting training and I had decided to read “The Scientific Principles of Strength Training” by Dr. Mike Israetel, Dr. James Hoffmann and Chad Wesley Smith*. One of the concepts in the book that I found particularly interesting was phase potentiation and how ideally we’ll set training up in a manner in which each block potentiates the next, on paper, sounds awesome… in reality, nearly impossible to reliably elicit again due to the sometimes random and always individual nature of training response. However, actually potentiating training and making the athlete feel like they’re gathering momentum week to week and block to block aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Framing different situations and training outcomes as wins, and stacking those wins over the course of a training cycle can be an incredibly powerful thing that bolsters an athletes training momentum as they push through the inevitable peaks and valleys of training.
It could start with something like simply getting 4 training sessions done in a week and then progress to hitting a new 10RM incline bench press and before we know it, we’re hitting competition PR.

*I would recommend giving this resource a read but take the ordering of the principles with a pinch of salt and when trying to apply these, ask yourself how you know any one thing is effective and allow that to order the level of credence you pay to each one. If you have no way of measuring how important or effective something is then you cannot give it a value for importance.

The meat and potatoes

So with the intangibles out of the way, let’s discuss actually putting pen to paper, or numbers in cells(?). 

In the incredibly wise words of Conor Campbell,

“We have many known knowns, we have a few known unknowns and we have many unknown unknowns and things that change a lot of the time”.

Do the best that you can, give yourself a break. If things stop working unexpectedly or training outcomes aren’t what you had hoped, the solution is simply to keep showing up. The process is under no obligation to make sense.

The Microcycle

There are a number of decisions to make at the level of the microcycle. One that is often taken for granted is the length of time that a microcycle lasts. In 99% of cases, a microcycle will be 7 days long in line with how we live our lives, however it is okay to break out of the confines of the week to week basis in which we live our lives. A microcycle can be as many days as you see fit to best suit the athlete. It can be more or less than 7, or something that I’ve been increasingly trying to normalize amongst my own athletes (with some phenomenal results) is the idea of an open ended microcycle. You have to work with the training resources that the person in front of you has to give. If they have a job that will inject uncertainty into their schedule, the super regimented microcycle that you’ve written, with specific training days and times, is useless. Instead allowing these athletes the flexibility to simply complete 3 or 4 training sessions in whatever number of days their lives allows for (there will probably be a small amount of variance here from microcycle to microcycle, but again something>nothing) can be the thing that allows them to string together a training cycle, rather than get stuck spinning their wheels and constantly in a state of flux.

Session Frequency

Session frequency and the length of the microcycle will provide the parameters for what you can do within the microcycle. If you have one hour p/session and 3 sessions, prescribing 10 accessories on top of main squat/bench/deadlift work is probably not going to be very effective from an adherence standpoint.

Exercise Selection

Powerlifting is extremely simple, which means the frequency the competition lifts doesn’t have to be very high from a skill acquisition point of view. The structure we generally find ourselves landing on is 2 squat and deadlift exposures and 3/4 bench press exposures. We use the word “exposure” very purposefully in place of something else like “movement pattern”. What counts as an exposure? Is a goblet squat a variation of the competition squat? Again, this depends on the individual and the historic training data that you’ve built up. Generally we prescribe one exposure to the competition lifts and the rest of these exposures are variations. The extent of the level of variation will depend on the equipment you have available to you. Variation can range from a varied rep range from your primary exposure, or beltless/sleeves work, to a heavy single on a specialty bar. These should all be viewed as tools in the toolkit, tested, measured and returned to where appropriate.

Context matters a lot when it comes to exercise selection. Your why can be very simple, you do not necessarily need to be targeting a weakness, or looking to make some important intervention with every variation you choose. While not all encompassing we will generally look to balance preference, development and intervention amongst the exercises we choose and naturally the degree to which we lean towards any one of those three things will depend on the person in front of us and the phase of training that they’re in. The reason that you prescribe a pause squat for example may differ greatly from individual to individual. For one person, it may be an attempt to intervene in a gentle manner and help them work on hitting depth, for another the reason might simply be, they like pause squats. There is no “tier list” when it comes to exercise variations, everything has a place.

Familiarity is often very important when it comes to competition prep blocks. Prep is generally not going to be the time to explore new territory when it comes to variation, so try and lean on variations you know to be effective or preferential to elicit the best possible training responses in the lead up to competition.

Volume & Intensity

Volume is generally measured in sets x reps.

Objective intensity is the weight on the bar, often in relation to your “one rep max”.

Relative intensity is how difficult something is and is usually measured with RPE (Rate of perceived exertion) or RIR (Reps in reserve).

I think it’s worth, at the outset, to make some clarifications about the nature of RPE, what it is, what it isn’t.

RPE is a means of rating the difficulty of each training set based on your own perception. There is no one way to come to that particular rating, you are not obligated to be completely one dimensional. I am often faced with the question of which is better, an RPE rating based on difficulty relative to competition day or reps in reserve or any other means of drawing a rating for your perceived exertion. The answer is, we don't know for sure but probably all of the above. Some people do end up zero-ing in on one or the other, or maybe not even finding any success in using relative intensity at all, but the majority of lifters will do well to look to utilize all of the before-mentioned strategies. A common phenomenon amongst our athletes is that the way in which they come to their rating of RPE will change over the course of a training block. At the start of the block as everything is quite novel and fresh, they may lean heavily on reps in reserve as a means of keeping the objective load a little lower and over the course of the block as they adapt further and further to the training stimulus, they will begin to rate more so on how the last rep of each set moved in relation to competition day attempts or something to that effect, often resulting in higher objective loads.

RPE is not a claim to a particular level of strength. Just because someone called their set something different to what you called it, does not necessarily mean they are making some undeserved claim to strength. If someone is deluding themselves with their RPE ratings, they will find out, and usually pretty quickly.

How much volume should we prescribe and at what intensity?

Workload prescriptions are often going to be based on historical training data. If someone comes to me with great experience of working with x workloads, I’m likely going to remain pretty close to what has worked for them in the past and allow the process to guide us further down that trail of athlete response. If another individual comes to us with absolutely no discernable training history, I’m probably going to attempt to find something approximating the “lowest effective dosage”. I’ll likely start off by prescribing the frequencies outlined above, with a topset on each exercise, 1-2 backdowns, and 1-3 accessory exercises afterwards, usually with 2-3 sets of 8-12 reps at 1-3 reps in reserve, all time availability depending.

There are so many potential caveats here that it probably isn’t worth giving any of them, take this with a pinch of salt and try and find out what works for you/the athlete.

So at this point, I’m hoping you have enough information to write your very own training microcycle and the know how to repeat these microcycles until you reach your time to peak (TTP) in adaptation to this training stimulus. Some simple heuristics on denoting when you’ve reached your time to peak are:
Do you hate training? If so, you’ve probably met the end of your ability to make positive adaptation from that training stimulus and you should call the block there.
Are you dealing with excessive fatigue or training discomfort? Again, if so, TTP probably achieved.

Are your training outputs beginning to dwindle? Did your week 5 PR turn into a poor week 6 session followed by an even poorer week 7 session? You’ve probably trained beyond your time to peak.

The reality is that the only way we’ll find out your time to peak is when we’ve gone past it. With repetition, time and patience a clearer picture about how many exposures of a microcycle it generally takes you to reach your time to peak will emerge and you can begin to develop some ideas on where to explore and what to exploit.

The pivot block

See our article on pivot blocks here!

To give you a quick overview, a pivot block is simply a block between blocks to make the transition easier in a variety of ways depending on what you’re looking for at any one time:

• Fatigue management

• Introducing novelty

• Injecting some fun into training

• Maintaining preparedness from block to block

A pivot block isn’t any one thing, it can look markedly different from person to person. Our article above will arm you with everything you need to know about pivot blocks.

One thing that may be worth noting is that generally a pivot block is going to be 1/3 the length of your previous block. So a 6 week block is likely to be followed by a 2 week pivot block.

Measuring training data

Often mysticized but in reality quite simple, training data is likely going to be separated into two unique formats:

Numerical Data & Interpersonal Data.

Numerical data is information collected from training outputs. One we tend to pay quite a lot of attention to is the estimated 1 rep max of our primary exercises over the course of a block. 

We employ a subjective fatigue monitoring system which allows us to build a numerical data pool for fatigue. The usefulness of this data can often be quite limited just because of the nature of adhering to such a system long term and the decision fatigue that can be associated with rating systems.. (the 1-10 rating is usually 7)

What really is the glue that ties all of this training data together is interpersonal data. It is the conversations had between coach and athlete that start to contextualize all of the above. Conversations are the heart and soul behind an athlete-centric training approach. A spreadsheet may tell you one thing, but once conversations add all of the colour the picture, you may end up following a completely different path as you attempt to truly individualize training.

To summarize, what you’re trying to do, is follow the trail of athlete response. I say “trying” purposefully, because you’re not always going to be able to. Sometimes training data will mean absolutely nothing and there will be no utilization for any of that data you’ve gathered. The answer in this situation will simply be, communicate with the athlete and try again.

This may have left you with quite a lot of questions, maybe even more than you had at the outset and that is very much the point. This process is so open ended, there are very rarely clearly right answers and everything is open to interpretation.

If you have any questions we would love to hear from you @odysseystrength on Instagram.