The joker sets are ingenious and there are plenty of opportunities for the more advanced lifter to customize and tweak the programming even further.

Joker sets have been the hottest request from Wendler’s new book Beyond 5/3/1: Simple Training for Extraordinary Results are now available in the calculator.

And even though 5/3/1 allows for rep maxes, it is much harder to add one rep per week than it is to add ~2-5lbs/1-2kg per week. However, his greatest success is his ability to simplify the complexities of strength training into templates so that anyone can apply them and achieve their goals. All I really need at this stage is something simple and straightforward to organize my weight sessions around. Put in the work, don’t have champagne expectations for beer effort and you’ll be the best person you can be. In Weeks One and Three, you use the Boring But Big Variation where you do 5×3 at 90% of your training max.

Each exercise gets just two low-intensity, mid-speed, low-volume sets per week, plus a single mid-intensity max volume set. In an entire month, you experience only three tough sets of an exercise – and only one of them is above 85% of your true maximum. Before reading this book, I confess that I tried applying the 531 to movements such as rows and pullups and the results were not all that great.You can either perform a single AMRAP (As Many Reps As Possible) set, or you can perform 3-4 sets of 5-8 reps. On the final set of each workout, you do as many reps as possible – aiming to break your personal record for reps that weight. Often, those who become depressed and discouraged after a bad workout are beginners and young lifters who don’t yet realize that greatness doesn’t always show up. The author has a no nonsense approach, which is refreshing compared with the self proclaimed gurus on the internet. This represents a major step forward in Jim’s training philosophy, introducing concepts like First Set Last (FSL) and Joker sets that have become 5/3/1 staples.

So be careful, because Plazma and Mag-10 will tell your muscles one thing but your joints will tell you another. Jim starts the book by going over the 5/3/1 principles and the importance of the training max found in the original 5/3/1 book.The only issue is that there are soooo many templates and variations that the entire thing is somewhat of a jumbled mess that you’re going to have to sort out for yourself. Moreover, this is the BASE programme, we’ll discuss some common variations and assistance templates down below. A big time saver for you so that you don’t have to reenter all your maxes, plates, etc each time you use the calculator.

So I did…and I still wasn’t convinced and the literature suggested I change my approach to Beyond 531, which Wendler says is his best work to date yet looks nothing like 531 and seems to contradict all the training principles I had just learned. The “original” version of the program published on T-Nation in 2009 does, in fact, only contain 3 working sets for each primary movement. He won the 2021 Helicon Short Story Award for his science fiction tale "The Three Billion Year Love" which appears in the Tuscany Bay Press Planetary Anthology "Mars.Like everything else, its no magic formula, you have to put in the hard work and discipline for it to work for you! It will take a lifter years to exhaust every possibility presented in Beyond 5/3/1 if you cant get bigger and stronger over time with the programmes and methods in this book then you’re beyond help. Nonetheless, you can’t criticize Wendler’s newest versions of 5/3/1 for ignoring individual differences. So the next time you have a bad workout, embrace it, remember it and do whatever you have to do to make your next workout better than the last one. All work sets should be done with a controlled (but NOT slow) eccentric phase and an explosive concentric phase.