Seeing as how it’s St. Paddy’s day, AND I have a wedding to attend (which explains the pinstripes pants and dress shoes), we’re going to keep things relatively simple today.

When you take time off from training, you need to ease back into low rep, high intensity training.  You can’t go straight from high rep sets of 8-10 to heavy singles.  Instead, use a few weeks to bridge the gap; heavy 5’s, heavy 3’s, and then some sub-maximal singles.

Not only does this help your system re-adapt to the heavy weights, but with any extended lay off or low intensity training phase your body forgets how to “grind” with heavy weights.  Jim Wendler, Dave Tate and Louie Simmonas have espoused “the strain” for years.

Basically, you have two options:

1 – Always incorporate SOME sort of high intensity, low rep work in your program, or

2 – If you take a break, ease back into the high intensity workouts with moderately low repetition sets (3’s and 5’s).

Stay strong and drink some green beer!

MR