There is alot of detailed information on the speed/ max effort days with westside training, some good sites to check out are
www.elitefts.com and
www.westside-barbell.com i think the westside is the correct site...
The general rule they go by is your max effort day is 72 hours after your speed day, but that doesnt have to necessarily be set in stone I suppose. How most westside trainers lift is speed day on wednesday and max effort on saturday. For speed day you usually do around 9 sets of 2-3 reps at 50-60% of your 1RM. You can use added resistance such as bands and chains here also, there are many options here. One way you could do it is one week just do straight weight for all your sets, next week use bands, following week use chains then repeat. You can also use a waved volume routine by say the first week you use 50% of your max, the next week use 55% of your max, following week use 60% of your max and repeat. Once you feel you have all those weights moving really fast you can start upping the weight. The key to speed day is not so much the weight, but just working on pure speed and explosiveness. They say the goal is to complete the one set of 2-3 reps in the same amount of time it takes you to complete your 1 rep max, you are moving a much lighter weight but at such a faster pace it really trains your CNS to fire harder and more in synch, so in theory the amount of weight you are moving in a given time period would be about the same as the amount of weight you move in a max, but not as strenuous on the body.
For max effort you can work up to a 1-3RM is usually what they do. For me a 3RM is as heavy as I can go without having to take the following week off, it is just too much for my CNS and my strength will drop if I try to come back the week after hitting a heavy single. Just have to find what works best for you. Where the westside style of training overcomes this problem is constantly changing exercises. You have several different max effort exercises to choose from for bench, you want to pick exercises that have a good carryover to the flat bench obviously. At elitefts.com there is an article by Dave Tate that gives all of the ME bench and squat exercises to choose from. A few would be flat bench, floor press, board press- here you can choose between several different board heights, close grip bench, incline bench, decline bench and so on. For beginners you can usually stick with a given exercise for ~3 weeks before you stagnate, then change to a different exercise. Each week you have to do more than the previous week, if you fail at doing this, it is time to change exercises. This is just a brief overview, there are alot more in depth explanations at those sites I gave, hope this helps.
Beelze, I got it once, tried 385 for a triple before I did 400 and got it twice with a little help on the third. Congrats on your 455 tonight knox, that was pretty much the first time you ever tried a shirt too lol. It was so fast, seriously!!
