My year of powerbuilding continues. After doing Brandon Campbell’s P.H.U.L., I’ve moved on to Layne Norton’s P.H.A.T. (Power Hypertrophy Adaptive Training). I did thirteen weeks of the program, six weeks at full volume, one deload week and then six more weeks cranked up.
P.H.A.T. marks the first time in my program training history I did a five day a week program and I had no idea how hard it would be to add that extra day a week to my programming. Missed days were, sadly, a pretty regularly occurrence. However, unlike my experience with P.H.U.L., I didn’t feel like there were any needless days in this routine. Somehow, with more days and more volume, Norton managed to make a program where everything seems vital.
I’ll be comparing P.H.A.T. to P.H.U.L. quite a bit here. They are the two powerbuilding programs dujour of the moment and they are the first two non-Jim Wendler programs I’ve done in two and a half years. Like P.H.U.L., there is some powerlifting, so it makes sense to talk 1 rep maxes (1RM) a bit, but again I decided not to truly test them. With P.H.A.T. being the first program I’ve done ever that did not have deadlifts nor a barbell overhead press in it, I really didn’t think a 1RM test would be worth much compared to more training.
With all that said, P.H.A.T. reminded me a bit more of a Wendler program than P.H.U.L., there was main work, and then there was supplemental work, on all the big compound lifts that P.H.A.T. features: bench press, barbell row and back squat. This supplemental stuff was even run…
