 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the video, man. Sal and Mike, today we're gonna talk about programming, setting yourself up for success in the squat. If you wanna get stronger, you wanna build your legs, we'll talk about different methodologies and philosophies in programming to get you there. If you wanna get involved, be sure to subscribe. Let's see if we can get a thousand likes on this thing with Huppert Boys. So much, it seems like you guys are liking the new series, talking to the basics of training, trying to give you guys tips to increase your muscle mass, to increase your strength. 3sb.co, if you wanna grab your clothing needs, man. We got new drops all the time. Go to companydiscord.com if you wanna get involved with the community. I'm in there everyday chatting with you guys if you have questions, you wanna just hang out. We talk about music, we talk about life, we talk about fitness. So we're talking about squats, we're talking about programming in general, kind of for any lift. Why I stay away from making programming videos is because there's a lot of tools that you have to have, more tools than a plumber, to become a good coach and programmer, and when you're doing it to individualize it, which is a slightly overrated term, but to individualize it, we're using different tools and utilizing different philosophies at separate times to build an overarching system to lead you to our goal. So the things I describe here will be ranges and very general because there's a lot of people that have squatted massive amounts of weights and had very thick thighs, big old donkeys, dumpers, that have done things a million different ways. But I'm gonna try to explain to you some tools and tips in your programming that work for most people and are probably optimal to get you to where you wanna go. Now, first thing we talk about are the three keys to programming, right? The three kind of scales that we get to tip and turn. We have intensity, which is how heavy something is or how close to your one rep max or how close to failure something is. We have your frequency, which is how often something is practiced or how often something is done. And then we have volume, how much is done, how much work you're doing within a workout a week, a month, a year. The biggest thing is how we manage those depending on your goal of strength or depending on your goal of muscle mass and where you're at in your block or your waves of training to manage fatigue and still make progress. That's where the lineups kind of change between strength and bodybuilding or building muscle, hypertrophy. All three of those can't be all the way turnt up. We can't have maximum frequency training to one rep max and doing 20 sets of 10 all year round or even in a week. Chances are you'll regress, you'll make less progress than you want or you will get injured or you'll just purely get burnt out and not enjoy yourself. So typically with powerlifting, what I like to do is a higher frequency style training, moderate volume and moderate intensity, depending. We'll start with the kind of powerlifting basics and then we'll head over to some hypertrophy stuff. For most people, what tends to work is a frequency of two to four times a week for the squat. Now I know that sounds like a big variance but it really depends on where you're at and what we wanna find is that sweet spot where you enjoy yourself, you're making progress and you can still push yourself. If you can make the same progress going twice a week as you would going four times a week, you're gonna be better off going twice a week because then we can save that energy and we can save our mental and physical energy for squats, deadlifts, life, playing video games, studying, whatever else you have to do. If we're plateaued at twice a week, that's when we might bump things up to three or four but we want the minimum effective dose, right? If we can get the progress with two, we wanna stick with two and a lot of people have. A lot of people make world records and win championships, international, national, et cetera, squatting twice a week. We're talking about volume and intensity now. There's something that I enjoy to do. So when we block things out, people call them macro or macro cycles, you can call them waves, you can call them whatever you want, programs, four week blocks, call it whatever you want but basically we'll map things out three to six weeks at a time and we'll block those out leading up to whatever our goal is. Typically with powerlifting, it's a competition. The further out from a competition with powerlifting is when we'll typically handle slightly more variations, which if you wanna talk about variations in accessories, check our last video on squats. The closer we get to a competition, the more specific we wanna be and wanna hit the competition style lift, right? For the practice but even further out, we wanna get efficient and be strong and confident in our skill, right? Most basketball players are still playing basketball in the off season, they're not off fishing or playing soccer to get better at basketball. You wanna play basketball to get better at basketball and same goes for the squat. We're talking about rep ranges. My personal opinion is that for powerlifting specifically in the competition squat or any of the variations, I don't like to go much above six, seven, eight reps. Now you can build strength and you can build muscle doing more reps but I think the risk to reward and risk, meaning just pure recovery and mental fortitude, you'll get more sore and more fatigued doing sets of 10, 11, 12, that is just not necessary. And if we're squatting two, three, four times a week, handling sets of six, seven, eight is plenty to build muscle, hit different muscle fiber types and still take a break from the heavier loads. Within a week, say we're squatting three times a week to keep things as simple as we can. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Within that, I typically have kind of three different style of trainings and three intents of the week. One intent of the week would be a heavy day and we call that like a strength day. We might handle sets of one to maybe five depending on those blocks. The second training day, I like to call maybe a practice day or a recovery day or a rest day. That's when both the intensities are slightly lower and sometimes the volume itself is slightly lower. The last day is typically more of like a hypertrophy day or a rep day or a volume day. So what does that look like when we're far away? So when that's far away from a meet, that might look like taking a nice single on our strength day, maybe a double or triple at an RPE678 and then we're doing anywhere from three to five sets of one to five somewhere in the similar pocket, sets RPE of seven, eight, maybe even nine depending on the wave. The speed day would be something like handling five, six, seven sets of one to five and we're handling anywhere from 60 to 80% moving those really efficiently, really fast, really strong. On the third day, the hypertrophy day, then we might be handling anywhere from sets of one to four, reps of six to eight and we're gonna handle anywhere from 50, 60, 70% pushing ourselves a little bit to raise our general strength to raise our general work capacity. Now you take those numbers and you just start to elevate all of them each block we get closer to a meet. The single on our strength day becomes more of a seven, eight, nine, maybe even a 10. The back down sets become sets of one, two and three turning up the RPE in intensity. The speed days become more like five sets of two and we start to turn up that intensity handling six, seven and eight RPE and then the hypertrophy days drop from sets of eight and now we're maybe doing sets of five and six again turning up the intensity as we slowly raise the amount of weight we lift. As the volume goes down, the sets and reps we turn that intensity up to build up the strength. Anywhere from four, six, 10 weeks out from a meet is when we start to flip that switch from kind of building with reps, sets and volume and we'll start to turn the intensity up and volume slightly down. How you do that depends on the individual. Some people do it much closer to a meet than others but the general idea is that we'll take fatigue away to allow us to express that strength the best we can. Hopefully during our training blocks we're in a certain state of being tired because we're working so hard squatting three times a week but eventually you want to adapt to that stimulus you want to adapt to that hard work and get to a baseline of recovery that now you can perform your best. In training the goal is to adapt, cause fatigue and really make your body work for that in fatigue. In competition the goal is to minimize that fatigue while keeping our fitness as high as we can to allow ourselves to lift the most amount of weight possible. Again, there's a bunch of different strategies but generally speaking, closer to the meet we'll start to take away some volume and turn up that intensity to prep ourselves both mentally and physically to handle the heaviest weights we ever have. Now for accessories, right? Which we've talked about in the past videos my main goal is always to build general strength to build general muscle and have that baseline of fitness. Those general programming will also waive sometimes to build the most amount of muscle where we need to get pretty close to failure or you need to push yourself in whatever exercise you're doing but the rep range doesn't matter super particularly. You can build muscle both in sets of five and in sets of 10 but you do have different levels of fatigue because you're using different muscles and different muscle fiber types and different loads, right? So going to a close to failure with a set of five will have a different stimulus mentally and physically than going close to failure with a set of 10 and that's also why we can block those out. I tend to just do some old school linear periodization when it comes to stuff like that. So my accessories, both myself and a lot of people I coach will do a block or two of sets of 10, you know, RPE 789 then we'll do a block or two of sets of 7 to 8, RPE 789 and kind of wave back and forth. Both with our variations in the off season we can switch them up block to block. Accessories are something I typically don't switch up that often. We find a handful, we find that feel good for the athlete, you get a good mind muscle connection and they target muscles that we need to assist and build for long-term strength goals and we'll just hammer those. So I know that's a lot of information without a lot of specifics because the specifics come when the individual athlete has particular things that help them or hinder them in their progress and that's where this large toolbox come into play and I have experience and coaching knowledge that allows me to kind of play those, you know we're really playing chess, not checkers so it gets a little bit complicated. I understand why people wanna learn about programming because they really enjoy lifting, coaching and wanna progress but the truth is the majority of people just need a basic understanding and then the best athletes in the world just follow what their coaches tell them and that's the honest truth. To be the best athlete you can, it's often not being the best or most knowledgeable coach you can. They don't go hand in hand. To be the best athlete you can, you almost wanna turn your brain off, put trust in your coach and just put in the work but of always I wanna help you guys, I wanna spread the knowledge that I've learned over the last 15 years in the game so hopefully that helps you a little bit. Appreciate you guys so much man, new videos every single Monday, new content every single day, it helps so much if you like this thing and share it. 3sb.co, be a part of something big in yourself man, we over me, Salah Mike, we're out of this one.