Peaking in a Hurry
I decide to enter an unequipped powerlifting competition. Only problem was that I only had 4 weeks to get ready. I knew that I needed to find a program that would allow me to practise my lifts many times over the next few weeks.

I stumbled on the Smolov Squat routine. It seemed to suit my needs.

1. It only lasted 4 weeks
2. Lots of practise in the exercise
3. Seemed to have a good write up from people who had used it.

The routine is as follows

My unequipped max was 170kg so I plugged in the numbers and got the following

I also used exactly the same program with the bench press. I found that my recovery was suffering towards the end of week 2 so for the last week I spread things out to give myself more time to recover. This is shown in the table below.

On the days I was not squatting or benching I performed 150 Hindu squats, 75 Hindu press-ups and 3 minutes of bridging. This was to help me make weight (82.5kg) and to help get blood into the muscle groups and aid in their recovery.

So did it work. I got to practise the lifts, with around 140 repetitions per week for the three weeks. So I became much more competent and confidence in the two lifts. The obvious drawback is that I couldn’t do any deadlifts, it would have just been too much. But had hoped that the deep narrow stance squats would have had a fair amount of carry over to my deadlift.
Well I entered a powerlifting meeting (The Eastern Districts) and posted a 200kg raw squat, 120kg bench and a 210kg deadlift. So I’d say it worked and I’m now peaking again for the Scottish. I’ll post that routine and my results in a few weeks.