How To Consistently Set Personal Records Forever

This is part 2 of a series on Broadening Your Horizons To Eliminate Plateaus where we dig into how to think a little differently inside the gym so you can continue to best your personal records, forever! This article is written by a dude with an 800+lb deadlift, who lifts odd objects, weird stuff, in bizarre ways, and makes it look pretty easy. He has fun, is constantly chasing new thrills, and doesn’t get hung up in someone else’s box of success.

If you haven’t read Part 1, start here: https://garagegymcompetition.com/anything-can-be-a-pr-broadening-your-horizons-to-eliminate-plateaus/

Thinking About Context

Article 1 is the idealized version of this mindset. The reality is that most people are not going to take such a flexible approach to training and goals regardless of how many personal records they set. Most people will always have set goals or specific movements/bars/rep ranges that they care about more. Everyone has a favorite child. And these favored lifts will probably stay in your training regularly, even if progress is slow. I will fully admit that even I can’t/won’t fully jump into this philosophy. So when you refuse to give up on a lift for a while you need to keep context in mind when looking at your results in the short term.

Scenario

Imagine this scenario. You are at the tail end of a program that heavily focuses on bench. The program has been tapering down and peaking you for a 1RM test in the final week. You hit a new personal record on bench in that final week. You move on to a new program that’s more focused on general hypertrophy, with heavier volume on arms (specifically triceps) and less dedicated bench work. Halfway through this program you have reason to try a bench 1RM and you absolutely shit the bed, losing 20lbs on what you can do for 1 rep.

Did you get weaker, did your bench get worse, should you feel terrible about it? No, to all of the above, the context is just different. You went from an ideal scenario for bench 1RM (lots of bench focused training, a body that has been permitted to shed fatigue and peak) versus a shitty scenario for bench 1RM (not much bench practice, a more heavily fatigued body, particularly crucial muscles like the triceps). You cant expect to perform the same in both situations.

Now imagine you keep training your bench in this program, and a similar program afterwards. Maybe 6 months later, if not more, you finally manage to tie your old 1RM personal record. Did you just now finally catch up to where you were? Again, no, you got a lot stronger. You managed to get the same lift in a much less conducive environment. If you go forward, train with a dedicated focus on bench again and let your body peak you are going to smash your old personal record, almost guaranteed.

Continued

Continuing on this train of thought, I want to propose that turning an old 1RM personal record into a single you can hit regularly in any kind of training situation is a huge accomplishment. In fact I would say that this should be the number one goal for the lifts you can’t quite drop from your training but have accepted need to move to the back-burner. I do not feel like I have stagnated when a lift has not gone up, provided I have maintained it in a context that is not good for that lift.

For example, just today I hit a single on bench equal to an old PR from the end of last year. This was lower than my current 1RM PR. At first my reaction was to be disappointed, but that is wrong. I am benching once a week (versus 3+ times like I was when I set the last two PRs), I beat the shit out of myself doing legs yesterday and have been training hard for hypertrophy in general for over a month now. I woke up this morning very clearly fatigued but I still managed to hit a rep, pretty easily, that only 8-9 months ago was the best rep I had ever done. That is progress.

Eternal: A Training Framework that Embraces this Mentality

I will start this section with a caveat that this will be a very loose idea of how a program that takes this idea to heart could look. Its not polished, its not tested, its just what I have come up with in a quick amount of time. I might come back and work with it more later but know that right now it’s a concept. But if it inspires you and you try something like it please let me know how it goes, I would love to hear about it. I think you could reasonably run this kind of training structure under any conditions and indefinitely (until you get bored of it or desire some more technical and focused training for specific goals anyways), hence the name.

The Basic Structure

-4-6 Days/wk

-2 Days PR Chasing Movements, 2 Days Anchor Movements, 0-2 Days Accessory Hypertrophy work

PR Chasing Movement Days

Pick 2 movements that you will be focusing on to set a PR every week. These should be movements you are reasonably familiar with but have not trained hard recently. Your main set of these day will be the PR Chase set. This should start with a Rep/Weight scheme that is challenging but not maximal effort. Every week you will perform this same movement with the goal of setting a PR by either adding weight or reps. You should not try to blow your previous weeks set out of the water, add only 5-10lbs (or even less if it is a light movement) or 1-2 reps.

You will stall eventually, the more solid weeks of progress you can get before that though the better. Before or after this PR set perform build up sets or back off sets, your preference. This should be 2-4 sets and should be relatively easy compared to the PR chase set. Drop weight and or reps compared to the PR chase set. I have not thought about this enough to give firm numbers so use your best judgement. If doing build up sets be sure to give enough rest before the PR chase set that you can give it a good effort. These sets are to be followed by your choice of accessory work. Ill give some rough ideas below.

When you fail to set a PR you have the option of giving it one more week if you think there is a good reason you failed (life got in the way, minor injury, ect), or moving the movement to the Anchoring days and choosing a new PR chase movement. If you picked an upper and a lower like I suggested choose the same type of movement to replace this one.

Anchor Movement Days

When starting the program you can just pick an upper and a lower (or whatever, again, you do you) movement that you have trained hard recently as you will not have any failed PR Chasing movements to use. On the anchor movement days we will focus on reinforcing the lift you just had a chain of PRs on. You will perform 3-4 sets with this movement, using a weight/reps that is just a bit easier than the PR, enough that preforming it 3-4 times with a good amount of rest is hard but doable. E.g. drop a 5RM to 3×3 or drop the weight by a bit less than 10% and perform 3×5.

Again, use your best judgement on these sets and adjust accordingly to get 3-4 hard, but doable working sets. When a PR chase movement gets moved to the anchor movement day the old anchor movement gets dropped from the program.

Again choose accessory work after these sets based on your preference.

Accessory Hypertrophy Days

These days are optional and you should pick a number of days according to your goals, recovery potential and time. For example, you should probably include one or both if bulking, but remove them when cutting. Likewise if you have a busy schedule you can probably ignore them, or if you know your recovery is shitty at the moment. I won’t tell you exactly how to train these days but I think an upper focused day and a lower would make sense, though other splits could also be acceptable depending on your goals and how you are laying out your accessories on other days.

Examples of Accessory splits

-U/Lx2 on the PR/Anchor days, full body (or preferential focus) or U/L on the dedicated accessory day(s)

-PPLx2 Spread across the six days, with your two favorite/most focused days on the dedicated accessory days

-Chest, Back, Arms, Shoulders/Legs

-You get the idea.

On the PR/Anchor days I would suggest keeping your accessory work reigned in, with quality over quantity. 3 sets of three movements with near max effort on the first two and maximal effort on the last. You can treat work for small muscles as extras on top of this if you have time.

For the dedicated accessory hypertrophy days feel free to indulge.

I think you can take some leeway with your split choices in regards to the PR chase and Anchor movements.

Conclusion

I don’t have much more to say. This is a mindset that I have been steadily embracing more and more. I think it has a lot to offer to many lifters who are starting to run into those longer plateaus around there focused lifts. I wish I had had the realizations I have now, earlier. It would have saved me some time and made some years of my training more productive.

For More

Original write up is from this Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/owm6yc/anything_can_be_a_pr_broadening_your_horizons_to/?ref=share&ref_source=link

Check it out for additional discussion and questions.

If you like Mark’s stuff, you can check out WAY more of his writing here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/19EGAa0QIpjMgOsFDvXu_uap3vZOwenee

And follow him on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/deadliestlift/