Did a TM test for 5/3/1 for the first time last week. (I just bought Forever and figured out I should do these regularly along with some other mistakes I've been making.) Had to lower my Press by something like 15 pounds, which is a big decrease when you're already only around 100 lbs. Lowered squat a bit too.
This week, I'm really glad I did. It felt great to get a lot of nice, clean reps in. After eating a slice of humble pie last week, this felt like one of my better weeks in a while.
I think most PPL programs follow your second example, with different exercises between Push 1 and Push 2. Same muscle group but different variation will probably give you a little bit more growth stimulus?
So my coach told me that my snatches were so slow that they might get red lights in competition 😂 so that was encouraging. Guess I need to work on my speed under.
I did 4x4 front squats with 82kg last week. I'm building my squat back up after multiple issues, starting with a quad tear about 7 years ago. Hopefully I can get it back up to a decent level soon.
Standard way to talk about weight includes the bar weight (usually 45 lbs or 20 kg, but I've seen others out there).
It's not a big deal when you're just tracking your linear progress, as long as you're consistent, but it's still helpful to include the bar weight when talking to other people (who will expect the bar weight to be included), and if you get later into more advanced lifting programs that prescribe certain percentages of some reference weight.
Barbell arithmetic becomes second nature after you've been doing it a while, too.
Week 3 of 5/3/1 with training maxes of deadlift/squat/bench of 385/335/180 lbs.
I was coming off of some mild illness that left me with no appetite all weekend, and I was definitely dehydrated coming into the week.
Deadlift: I hit 5 reps of 370 lbs on my 1+ set. Didn't love that, but I went for a joker set anyway and did 2 reps of 405.
Squat: Warmed up with the wrong bar (25 kg instead of 45 lbs), started to get confused why it felt so heavy on my 5-rep set. Double checked and switched over to a 45-lb bar. For my 1+ set, I did 6 reps of 320 lbs, then a joker set of 3x350.
Bench: Did 5x170 on my 1+ set, did a joker set of 2x190. Felt ok. Accessory work after felt pretty good, though. Not sure what to make of that.
Overall, I'm a little bit disappointed with the reps I managed on these workouts. Can't tell how much was loss of sleep, dehydration, illness, whatever, but I think I wasn't 100% this week. Still, I think I'm ready to try to move up by 20 lbs on deadlift/squat training max and 10 lbs on bench, as I recover and should feel much better next week than I did this week.