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How to use Wendler’s 5/3/1 with Biofeedback

The following tutorial is a an explanation by Tucson fitness trainer Eric Frey. Eric owns and operates Quality Strength in Tucson. This post was originally shared as a reply to a question in my public Biofeedback Training group about how to use biofeedback with 5/3/1. The answer was so good that I wanted to archive it here for people who are curious about how to use a program like 5/3/1 but integrate biofeedback. I’ve edited it for clarity and legibility as an article, but all the ideas are his.

91q5+t+JRGL — Image Credit: Jim Wendler Jim Wendler

5/3/1 is often the foundation of my program. I love it and have found it to be very flexible, more so once I started adding in the biofeedback. I can’t speak to other programs, but here’s how I do 5/3/1. Your mileage may vary.

Wendler says that the goal should be to set rep records on the main lift every workout. This is in line with the goal of setting a PR every day, but it may be too specific for what your body wants to do on a given day. So first off, I throw that imperative out the window.

Let’s assume your main lift tested well. Even on the third wave your first two sets, which should be submaximal are only 75% for 5 and 85% for 3. Keep in mind that these are percentages of a training max, and not a true 1 rep max. Training max should always be 90% (sometimes it will be less than) of your 1RM. So, these sets, on most days, are still not going to be very hard. I find they serve very well as work up sets. Again, all of this is assuming your main lift tested well, which I test while warming up. I do test after each warm up set and those first two sets to see if there’s a reason to stop. For me, if the lift tests well, the weight usually isn’t the deal-breaker. If for some reason, I have to stop increasing the load, then I do and just work with what tested well for the main lift. (ddn note: this is a key point – you may not be able to hit your “target” weight, but you can often get more volume in at a lower intensity – and still set a volume PR for that weight.)

The max set of main lifts in waves 1-3 are all just that, undefined “max” sets. Here is where I focus on the elements of effort and use those to tell me when to stop. I find that works exceedingly well.

If the main lift doesn’t test well, I test variations or if no macro variations work well then I might try to break it up into smaller pieces or components of the lifts. I’ll work up to a good set of five, or a triple and move on. Close enough is good enough.

When planning my next cycle, if I find I’ve done well then I’ll increase the training maxes by small increments, as Wendler recommends, and keep pushing. If I find that I’ve had to make a lot of substitutions, then I will plan my next cycle to accommodate that. Usually, however, I try to make the changes in the assistance work, since I’m often using 5/3/1 to prep for a meet, and so I don’t want to deviate too far from the basic 4 lifts.

The assistance work is where you can be really flexible and rock the heck out of the biofeedback. I figure as long as I’m getting about 50-100 reps total of assistance work choosing exercises and loads by testing, then I’m ok. I try not to overthink it too much. I do less volume the closer I get to a meet. Wendler 5/3/1’s is fairly saggital plane dominant, so the assistance work is where I really try to squeeze in things that I know are lacking in my daily activities and transverse plane stuff.

There are days when the main lift and a few variations don’t test well. Let’s say this lands on squat day, I’ll take it to mean I ought not do squats today, and I’ll bail on that workout. If I think I can re-arrange the week, say flip squat and bench day, then I’ll see if that tests well. If I don’t think I can do that, I’ll do some stretching, rolling, mobility, tai chi, or what not, and try again tomorrow.

Early on in my playing around with biofeedback I had this one workout. Main lift didn’t test well. Variations didn’t test well. It was a squat day. Tried deadlifts, didn’t test well. Bench and push-up variations, didn’t test well. Rows and chin ups? Nope. I spent a half hour testing things to see what I could do. Nothing tested well and I felt like crap the next day. Since learning that lesson, if things don’t test well I don’t push it. I just do some active rest and pick up the next day.

Again, this is what works for me. Keeping the training max low is important in the main lifts. Hope that helps.

ddn’s note: Wendler’s 5/3/1 is a tried-and-true time-tested programming template for strength and muscular development. That said, I’ve known enough people who have been frustrated with their 5/3/1 results to know that it leaves something to be desired in terms of results for some people. It’s my experience that these folks are following the program too rigidly and not taking advantage of times when they could do more than what is called for while simultaneously forcing it when they should be doing a little less than what is programmed. Using biofeedback to bespoke this template gives you the best of both worlds – a proven paradigm for progressive strength training, and a way to customize it to make it work even better for you.

by david 2 Comments

What Corrective Exercise Can’t Tell You

The truth is there is no such thing as corrective exercise. There are exercises, and they cause one or more of three effects:

Desirable and desired adaptations and outcomes.
Undesirable or undesired adaptations and outcomes.
Immediately painful or harmful injuries or outcomes.

To be more accurate, any exercise is going to have outcomes that exist on a spectrum with some desirable and undesirable adaptations happening at the same time, with hopefully no immediate injury. The degree to which it’s skewed towards desirable depends on the programming – and how appropriate it is for the goal.

An example of this would be the classic bench press. While it will certainly build greater strength and rigidity in the chest and horizontal pressing musculature, at some point those ranges will be so strengthened that other various ranges of motion will be so disused as to be compromised – usually an undesirable outcome at least when it gets to a certain point.

If your shoulder mobility gets so compromised (or it started out that way) that you can no longer perform some other thing you need to be able to do (press overhead, reach in the back seat of a car, take off your bra) then you’d do some “corrective” exercises to bring about this new desired outcome.

So you see, there is no such thing as corrective exercise. There are exercises, and they either do what we want them to do or they don’t.

That being said, for the sake of argument, I’ll use the colloquial word corrective exercise to describe an exercise you do to elicit a very narrow and specific adaptation, usually to improve a specific movement function.

Let’s say you want to increase your ability to dorsiflex your ankle. A lack of dorsiflexion can hinder a squat, by forcing the shin to have to stay too vertical, pushing the hips back and shifting the center of gravity behind your base of support. Not strong.

A simple and common ankle dorsiflexion drill is to simply (either from standing, or kneeling) push the knee over the toes, sometimes with band pressure around the ankle either pulling anteriorally or posteriorally.

This is a perfectly fine drill – with a caveat:

Is it good for your body to do?

We already know that you have limited ankle dorsiflexion and it’s negatively affecting your squat. Improving it would be helpful to the squat. But there’s a reason it’s not moving or at least there was, at some point. Is moving it going to make you better or worse?

You can certainly jam the square peg into the round hole, but you may be doing more harm than good.

Fortunately there is a very simple, very easy, and incredibly effective way to determine if this is good for you to do or not.

Enter biofeedback testing.

Biofeedback testing can be used for any movement, big or small. While the most common application for most people is going to be testing their macro movements (bench press, incline press, close grip bench press) I always encourage people to test EVERYTHING.

The video walks you through the exact example above, testing an ankle dorsiflexion drill to determine if it’s good for you to do or not. What’s more, I go through testing a common modification of the drill that is often used but I have found does not test well for most people with limited mobility. From experience I’ve learned that doing drills that don’t test well actually does more harm than good.

Are you still blindly doing things that you think are good for you, or are you testing it so you’re certain?

by david 3 Comments

Why Different is Different

One of the more catchy things I’ve said, that has been quoted and attributed to me is this phrase, “Different shit is different.” Had I known how often I would be cited on that, I probably would have chosen something a little more elegant to be my legacy, but so it goes.

But, I want to formally clear up what the true intention behind this statement is, because it’s not exactly what some people have taken from it. What a lot of people take from this quip is that “Well, back squats and front squats are different but they’re both good so you should do them.” Sure, yes, but that’s not what I meant.

To understand where I’m coming from with this statement, you have to understand a certain mentality that some coaches have. It is often expressed in statements like “If you can’t squat below parallel with your body weight, you shouldn’t ever barbell back squat.”

Well, see, here’s the problem with that:

Different shit is different.

Truly, we have only began to understand the complexity of the human body. Not only does changing a single joint angle change ALL of the joint angles in the body as well as all associated muscular and connective tissue levers, but there is a nervous system change as well. These certainly well-intentioned coaches subscribe to a flawed philosophy of movement, that there is right and wrong, and moving “wrong” is a sure path to pain and injury.

Movements of the body don’t fall on a nice tidy spectrum where one leads to another which leads to another. It’s not a chain that relies on each link before it, where if one link is missing nothing can be done beyond that point.

Every movement is simultaneously discrete and connected.

Every movement either potentiates or inhibits another movement, but at the same time has it’s own independent effect on the body.

It’s for this reason that any assessment system that is predicated on the idea that the ability to do or not do one movement is predictive of another is inherently flawed.

It may well be that if you can’t do a bodyweight squat, you also can’t do a back squat. It also may not be true.

It definitely isn’t true that if you can’t do a bodyweight squat you’re guaranteed to get hurt doing a barbell back squat.

Because, different shit is different.

I take it with a grain of salt when someone says to me: “I can’t deadlift.” I refuse to believe that there isn’t some way, shape, or form in which you can pick up a weight from off the ground. There are truly very few people who actually can’t pick something up off the ground. If you bend over and pick up a pencil, you are doing a deadlift. It may not be a lot of weight, and it may not follow the conventional form of a deadlift, but make no mistake that you are lifting up a dead weight. That’s where we’ll start, and where we go from there only your body knows.

Sometimes the smallest tweak to one thing such as hand or foot position is all that is needed to significantly change a movement, from something you can’t do without pain to something you can do completely pain free.

In fact, there is evidence that chronic low back pain is associated to reduced variability in movement. Of course, it’s hard to know which came first, the chicken or the egg, but I would offer that in my experience, the more variability in function you introduce to a person who is in pain, the more quickly they find themselves out of pain.

While I’d like to pretend to be all Eric Cressey up in this b and tell you exactly which nerves are innervating which muscles and explain exactly why one change causes a specific result the reality is that I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. In the end, my less-than-couth quip is about as good an explanation as any, and it doesn’t matter why because it doesn’t change the outcome.

Being able to move pain free in more ways begets moving pain free in more ways.

Once I had a client who couldn’t do a pain-free squat with any implement I handed her. Barbell, dumbbell, kettlebell, it didn’t matter – pain. Until I swapped the kettlebells in a front rack for a sandbag. Pain free squat. Was it the slightly different shape of the sandbag? Maybe. Or was it the fact that the sandbag was the only non-conductive implement she tried and this had an effect on the electrical impulses in her body? I don’t have a clue, but I know she could squat pain free.

Because, again and again we see, different shit is different.

So the next time that someone, or your own ideology, places an artificial limitation on you based on the idea that everything is the same stop and ask more questions. With better questions comes more progress and better results.