Having trained alongside Joah most days since she moved in with me more than four years ago, I have a lot of experience with her limitations and preferences, most of which arise from the challenge of keeping her knees happy. When I took over her programming I didn't want to squander time by getting her injured any more than I wanted the guilt of injuring her or the shame of losing her trust in me. Unfortunately her knee issues flared up not long after Nationals, but that confirmed that three-week training blocks followed by week-long deloads would be the best structure for her training.

Other insights from Joah's injury history included the need to keep squats and deadlifts on separate days, to group lower-body and upper-body exercises separately within the workout, and to avoid large changes in training stresses. These, too, had been hard-learned through training mishaps.

Joah left Nationals wanting some basic hypertrophy programming, especially for her lower body. She also had some aesthetic goals for her upper body. Because big changes in training stresses seem to be a trigger for her knee inflammation, I had to avoid some kinds of daily undulating programming that I might have considered. It was tempting to get her training both with high intensities, to preserve her form and better learn her capabilities, and with lower intensities, to efficiently accumulate the volume needed for hypertrophy, but that's simply not worth the risk, even if I could convince her to try. (I could not.)

My compromise was to give Joah relatively high rep ranges for the accessory movements that would directly address lagging body parts but to keep the big compound exercises, which to start out were all variants of the competition lifts, at more moderate rep ranges. A traditional block-periodized structure allows her to get hypertrophy work in without wild fluctuations in training stress. To provide adequate frequency of stimulus, I gave her each exercise twice a week, with two slightly different rep ranges for the compound lifts. To speed up her workouts and improve her already-impressive work capacity, I encouraged her to super-set antagonistic accessory movements where she can.

(There's some scientific evidence for the benefits of periodization and for the superiority of undulating periodization among experienced lifters. Joah does some undulation, weekly as well as daily, but I'm keeping the peaks and valleys close to each other.)

It's impractical to get Joah to the gym more than four days a week, both because other commitments regularly intrude and because unexpected work emergencies will sometimes force her to move a scheduled workout back by a day. She'd grown used to working out four days a week, and my current programming also has me at the gym four days a week. This was one variable that wasn't worth messing with.

For similar reasons, each of Joah’s workouts has to be full-body. Breaking out upper- and lower-body exercises might have made sense, in order to reduce her warm-up time and reduce the effects of accumulated fatigue on exercises performed later in each session, but even if she had time for more sessions each week, doing all the work needed without any overlap would be a struggle. (A cycle longer than seven days could work instead, but that gets to be difficult to schedule and could easily interfere with a four-day training split.)

Thanks to her injuries, Joah's training history, though well-documented, was even less illuminating than it might have been after only a couple years. We suspected that she had a very high work capacity, but her optimal volume numbers had to be guessed at. Her accessory lifts got more reps each week of the hypertrophy block, with the number of sets left constant, and they steadily rose. That she gained muscle was obvious, too, even to casual acquaintances.

Each week of the first few development blocks I added sets to the compound lifts, and each deload I dropped them back down a little, only to push higher in the next development block. We never found solid limits, but the workouts began to take longer than she could realistically spend at the gym and as the weeks went by her body began to reject large numbers of sets for squats and deadlifts. I’ve settled for “enough” volume rather than “optimal” volume, and as intensity rises that volume has to be reduced.

To avoid rapid fluctuations in intensity, I give Joah reduced sets and reps in her deload weeks, rather than reduced weights. But in addition to resetting and permitting recovery, those weeks introduce the next training block’s exercises. That allows her to learn new movements and find appropriate loads for them without the pressure of maximizing her workload immediately. The shorter deload workouts also provide time for her to figure out new equipment, if necessary.

Joah adores all the specialty bars, bands, chains, and so on, and this style of training has given her a chance to use some of the toys that often don't show up in raw powerlifters’ playpens, which also helps to keep training fresh and engaging across the months. (Unfortunately, I haven't found much time to fit in work with her beloved Swiss bar.) I've followed the general pattern of gradually shifting from more-extreme exercise variants down to the competition lifts, as well as phasing out accessories to allow more energy for the compound lifts. If I've done my job, the hypertrophy in her muscles and the weaknesses addressed by the variant lifts will permit her to move larger loads. Her continued hard work will also preserve her hypertrophy.

Joah's experience with online coaching left her dead-set against autoregulated programming. The extra work of estimating an appropriate intensity to reach a particular rate of perceived exertion, or guessing how many more reps she could have done at a given intensity, or multiplying her estimated maximum lift (sometimes for an unfamiliar exercise) by the estimated percentage on an RPE chart – she was having none of it. She wanted her role in the gym to be following the workout and working hard, not making decisions.

I keep an eye on the approximate percentages for Joah's lifts, but I'm not really using a percentage-based system. That's partly because it's difficult to estimate how much less she might be able to deadlift from a two-inch deficit, to use one of many possible examples, but also because even her supposed maxes might be misleading. When your third deadlift attempt wins Nationals and another lifter's coach says it looked like “RPE zero” it's safe to assume there's more in the tank. Lifting percentages of PRs that are well short of her true maximum lifts would only be a waste of time. As with everything, I have to watch her performance and adjust rather than follow some orthodoxy.

So far it’s been fun to team up this way, and I’m excited to see how she performs in Costa Rica.