I'm still thinking about your increases question. I'm not sure I have a good answer because I don't think strength levels across various rep schemes will increase linearally with your 1 rep max.
If you think of it on a percentage basis for example, if you increase your 1RM by 10lbs. your 80% back off set should only increase by 8lbs. That's obviously not a feasible increase.
I do think your ideas are good and they should work, my only recommendation may be to skip the small drop sets (ie the bolded 1x1x235, 2x1x225). After you hit the one if you don't think you can hit a 2nd at that same weight it means it was a pretty significant effort and you should should just move on to the back off sets and let your body recuperate. You hit a new 1RM at this point so its probably safer in the long run to be happy with that and then work at the second rep the next week.
. . .
Does that make sense? This would be more of a by feel approach. The only issue if you are jumping your 5s and 3s at different times you may be encroaching the other rep scheme so you may want to increase them simultaneously when you hit the full set of both in one workout.
Just some ideas to ponder.
Thanks, as always. You've become something of a personal trainer in addition to trainer partner. You've been thinking about sets and reps a lot more seriously for a lot more longer than I have, so I really appreciate the feedback.
I've developed a pretty good feel for a training 1RM on the bench press over the years, but I'm still finding my way with training singles on the deadlift and squat. And I'm just beginning to get a feel for triples and five-rep sets, and how they all fit together. I expect the learning curve won't be too bad, and within a few months I'll have a pretty good feel for how to progress, but in the meantime, I need some sort of MO to begin the experimentation. Like you said, going by percentages isn't really feasible, plate-wise, and I'm also not prepared to do calculations in the middle of a workout.
That said, I've become much more willing to monkey with small increments than I have been in the past. Yesterday it was kind of a drag dealing with five- and ten-pound plates on the squat, but it did enable me to hit a pretty good 30-pound spread between the 1/3/5 rep-counts. One thing though, that I've noticed after just a week, is that the triples tend to feel hardest, which seems to suggest that a rigid plate-based spread of 20, 30, or 40 pounds (for the bench, squat, and deadlift, respectively) isn't quite capturing the correct percentages. Perhaps with a five- instead of ten-pound grain, I could hone in on a better triple, bringing it down five pounds, which would make it a little closer to the five-rep set, and a little further from the single. 3x1x225/3x3x205/2x5x185 >>> 3x1x225/3x3x200/2x5x185. That is there seems to be a greater drop off between the singles and triples than there is between the triples and quintuples. Does that jibe with your experience? I guess ExRx and Bodybuilding's calculators (
http://exrx.net/Calculators/OneRepMax.html,
http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/other7.htm) put the triples at around 90% and the quintuples at around 85%, which is similar, so maybe I could try approximating these percentages, while keeping in mind that I'm doing more than one set at each rep-count?
So, anyway, for both these reasons, right now, I'm leaning towards increases of 5-pounds, which will mean going out and picking up two 2.5-pound plates. At first, I will try increasing everything by five pounds across the board, and then adjust by feel according to one of the schemes we've discussed, perhaps adjusting the triples and quintuples as a percentage of the single along the way.
I think I agree with you that small drop-sets at a given rep-count probably won't work. I like the idea of keeping all the sets intact, with three sets for the top weight, three sets for the middle, and two for the bottom, and dropping reps off the final reps if need be, but your idea of dropping sets might work too. So really, it's a choice between a drop-rep scheme and a drop-set scheme.
From
3x1x225
3x3x205
2x5x185
to
3x1x230
3x3x210
2x5x190
with the possibility of either dropped reps:
2x1x230
2x3x210, 1x2x210
1x5x190, 1x4x190
or dropped sets
2x1x230
2x3x210
1x5x190
At this point I think I'm learning towards dropped reps, provided the increases are five rather than ten pounds. If the increases are ten pounds, then I think a drop-set approach might work better. Does that make sense? The disadvantage of the drop-rep approach is that it would probably mean failing reps one in a while. The problem with the drop-set approach is that you might not push yourself quite as much as you could. You may have determined to only do one set at the next weight increment, when really, you were capable of doing 2 or 3.
Anyway, we'll see how it works out in the coming weeks. One way or the other, I'm pretty sure this more fixed set/rep approach is going to work well for me. It's just a matter of working out the details. I really liked how workaday the squats felt yesterday. There's a good chance I'll be able to get through most of my programmed workouts most of the time now, something I've always struggled with, and yet the scheme is flexible too. Both the Monday and the Wednesday workouts can easily be cut in two in case I'm short on time, with the second half being done the following day: Mon: DL&Pull > Mon: DL, Tues: Pull; Wed:SQ&Bench > Wed:SQ, Thurs:Bench. If I'm short on time Friday, I'll just do the OH Presses, since I've already gotten in the rows and chinups on Monday or Tuesday.
About the intervals, I've never been able to do slow running/jogging breaks. I always take walking breaks.