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.

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.

I like stir frying for the versatility in playing around with different ratios of vegetables to meat as your macros allow (and can be paired with rice as macros allow). Yes, sometimes that’s broccoli, but often it’s something like snap peas, onions, carrots, bell peppers, celery, even peanuts or cashews. And you can rotate through chicken, beef, pork, shrimp, tofu, seitan, etc. It’s basically a formula that takes away a lot of the thinking while giving the versatility to make full use of the ingredients you have on hand, and doesn’t get tedious or repetitive.

Similarly, I use a lot of vegetables for pasta, and do some kind of pasta primavera pretty often: blanch some combination of broccoli, broccolini, peas, snow peas, snap peas, asparagus, fiddleheads, etc., and then put in with your cooked pasta and cover in freshly grated parm, maybe some cream or butter. Add chicken or shrimp if you’d like to take it in that direction. Use high protein or whole grain pasta if you’d like.

Or even a traditional tomato based pasta sauce has a ton of room for other vegetables, meats. And it doesn’t even have to top pasta, if your macros don’t have room for those carbs. A red sauce can be put on eggplant or zucchini and still tastes great.

Predate rationalism? Modern rationalism and the scientific method came up in the 16th and 17th centuries, and was built on ancient foundations.

Phlogiston theory was developed in the 17th century, and took about 100 years to gather the evidence to make it infeasible, after the discovery of oxygen.

Luminiferous aether was disproved beginning in the late 19th century and the nail in the coffin happened by the early 20th, when Einstein’s theories really started taking off.

Plate tectonics was entirely a 20th century theory, and became accepted in the second half of the 20th century, by people who might still be alive today.

It means you have a lot more strength to gain. I think you can afford to just maintain while getting stronger, maybe for a few months, and then when you start cutting again it’ll be easier.

I am not sure how to judge my strength.

You could always plug in your numbers and take a look:

https://strengthlevel.com/

I’d say that if you still have a lot of strength to gain, then you can afford to keep cutting until it starts interfering with your workouts.

That being said, I find it easier psychologically to stick with a long term plan when I’m not cutting too much or too long.

Ok, thanks, I’ll just set a threshold for myself. If I do more than 6 reps at 95% for my 1+ set, I’ll do a joker set for 105%. If I bang out at least 5 reps on that first joker set I’ll do 115% for a second joker, before going into accessory work.

We’ll see how that goes.

So when you say your BMI is 30, are you a strong 30 or a fat 30? And have you plateaued in your strength gains from resistance training, or are you stronger than you were a month ago?

Personally, I find it easier to cut when I have the fitness to be able to burn a ton of calories through exercise: being able to run 30 minutes straight, being able to put in a high volume weight lifting workout, etc.

So if it were me, I’d lean towards pausing the cut and just getting stronger and fitter on the same weight, so that the next round of cutting, a few months from now, is easier.

Then again I’ve never been able to maintain a cut for more than 2-3 months, so you should be aware of my bias.

Science is a process for learning knowledge, not a set of known facts (or theories/conjectures/hypotheses/etc.).

Phlogiston theory was science. But ultimately it fell apart when the observations made it untenable.

A belief in luminiferous aether was also science. It was disproved over time, and it took decades from the Michelson-Morley experiment to design robust enough studies and experiments to prove that the speed of light was the same regardless of Earth’s relative velocity.

Plate tectonics wasn’t widely accepted until we had the tools to measure continental drift.

So merely believing in something not provable doesn’t make something not science. No, science has a bunch of unknowns at any given time, and testing different ideas can be difficult to actually do.

Hell, there are a lot of mathematical conjectures that are believed to be true but not proven. Might never be proven, either. But mathematics is still a rational, scientific discipline.

Got me a new Lemmy account, now that lemm.ee is shutting down. But I’m @exasperation@lemm.ee, back with a 5/3/1 question.

As background, when I started this program 2 weeks ago my training maxes were set to:

Bench: 180 lbs
Squat: 335 lbs
Deadlift: 385 lbs

I’m going into my first 1+ week and I’m confident I’ll be able to bust past 5-8 reps on most of the 1+/95% sets this week, based on my 10-rep sets at 90% this past week.

So I have to ask: what’s the protocol for joker sets? I know Wendler kinda hates them, but I’m still kinda convinced I might have selected too low of a training max.

If I bang out 6-8 reps of my 95%, should I add 10% and attempt 1+ reps of 105%? What about 115%?

Or am I just getting ahead of myself, and shouldn’t push those limits until I get comfortable with the program?