Eighteen months in, three sessions a week, about seventy minutes each, currently running a 5x5. The bar keeps moving so the programme is clearly working, but nothing visible has changed since roughly month nine. I do not compete, and adding a fourth day is not happening with my shifts. Is heavy first and then higher rep back off work a sensible compromise, or is that just doing two things badly?
Going to be the unwelcome answer: if you have added weight to the bar for eighteen months and the mirror has not moved, the rep range is probably not your problem, your food is. Muscle is built out of a calorie surplus and enough protein, and plenty of people run a perfectly good hypertrophy block while eating at maintenance and conclude the programme failed. Track what you actually eat for two weeks before you rewrite the training, because if you are not gaining any weight at all, no rep scheme is going to fix that.
It is not two things badly, it is the standard way people run this and it has a name in most programmes: top set then back offs. Concretely, keep your 5x5 main lift but make it one or two hard sets of five rather than five sets, then do three sets of eight to twelve on the same pattern at maybe sixty five percent, then two accessories in the ten to fifteen range for whatever is lagging. Same session length, most of the strength stimulus preserved, far more total hard sets for the muscle. The reason 5x5 stops changing how you look around month nine is not the rep range, it is that five sets of the same compound is a low number of hard sets per muscle per week once the weight is heavy enough that you need long rests.
Total hard sets per muscle per week is a number I have genuinely never counted. Doing that tonight.
Count it honestly, only sets taken near failure. Most people running a barbell only programme find they are at four or five per muscle and are surprised.
The distinction that matters is that strength is specific and size is not, or at least much less so. Getting strong at a five rep back squat is a skill as much as a tissue adaptation: the groove, the bracing, the tolerance of heavy loads. Muscle growth is far more forgiving about rep range as long as the sets are taken close enough to failure and the volume is there. So the practical rule is to keep the heavy work for the lifts whose numbers you care about, and let everything else live in whatever range you can recover from and actually enjoy. That is why a competing lifter and a bodybuilder can look at each other's programmes and both be right.
Close enough to failure is doing a lot of work in that sentence and I suspect I am not close.
Almost nobody is at first. Take one accessory set to actual failure once a week just to recalibrate what two reps in reserve feels like.
Heavy triples or fives on one lift, then eight to twelve on everything else. Do not add a day, add sets to the days you have.
@soloseat_sana · 2mo ago
I ran pure 5x5 style work for close to two years because the progression was addictive and I liked seeing the spreadsheet go up. Ended up strong, thick through the back and legs, and with arms and shoulders that looked like I had never been in a gym, because the programme touched them for two sets a week. Adding curls, lateral raises and rows in the twelve to fifteen range for six months did more for how I looked than the entire previous year did. It also did not hurt the big lifts at all, which was the thing I was afraid of.
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