Should You Take Singles Year-Round?

Taking a top single every single week on your lifts has become a very popular approach in many modern powerlifting programs. In fairness, it isn’t anything new—one of its forerunners and not-too-distant cousins was the Max Effort Method from Westside Barbell. It’s not hard to see why it’s become so widely used either, lifting heavy weights for singles is what the sport of powerlifting is all about, and what the majority of us would like to be doing with our time. But is taking heavy singles year-round the best approach? Let’s look at some arguments, both pro and con.

The Case For Singles

1. They’re Specific

Practice how you play! Everyone competes with singles and it makes sense to train this way as well. Handling maximal loads is a skill in and of itself, separate from building general strength, and it must be practiced by itself. I believe these things to be completely valid reasons for including singles in training, but I do think some problems can arise when people are taking singles for too much of the year, use them for the wrong reasons, or over-inflate their importance at the expense of other training. More on this next!

2. They Bring The Intensity

Intensity—the kind that’s measured via percent 1RM, RPE, or RIR—is a key component of strength training, and by definition the highest loads you’ll be able to lift for any given relative intensity will be for singles. This can be a welcome thing for many lifters who are following programs that lack sufficient intensity to see progress.

Going back to our last section, executing your technique under high intensity is a skill in itself. There are many ways to build strength and muscle, but many of them do not translate directly to performance on the platform without specific practice. This is where singles are most useful in my opinion—in maintaining your very specific powerlifting technique, even while you build strength using other rep ranges, exercises, and protocols.

3. An Accurate Measuring Stick

This one is somewhat less understood by most, but top singles specifically can be a method to gauge progress from week to week, athlete readiness, and the efficacy of the current training program. I think this is a completely viable excuse for including singles frequently, but usually it entails not overdoing the intensity side of things. If it is indeed being used primarily as a way to TEST the program, it shouldn’t be so intense as to DISRUPT the program.

The Case Against Singles Year-Round

1. Staleness

Specificity is a double-edged sword. Singles are a highly potent stimulus for powerlifting. The thing about any stimulus is, we adapt to it over time. This can be true of exercises, protocols, and intensities. So if you perform singles every single week of the entire year, the adaptations you can expect to reap from doing them (in the form of driving maximal strength) diminishes. This may not sway you from including them for the sake of testing, as alluded to earlier, but it should give you pause if you expect to hit singles every week to force progress. Specificity is an important component to exercise, but so is variety, and doing the exact same things week in and week out will probably get you where you’re going slower than adding variety when things get stale.

2. A Case of the “Overshoots”

Let’s be honest with ourselves here. If you’ve ever been programmed a top single @6, you’ve turned it into an @10. It can be accidental of course, but often times—especially with younger (male) lifters—it’s done on purpose, out of either a fundamental misunderstanding of the logic of the program, or because they want the instant gratification of having hit the heavier weight now rather than later (when it actually matters).

It’s not usually the end of the world, but quite often its enough to disrupt the week or the block of training, impair recovery and subsequent sessions, and overall reduce performance long term. The biggest problems arise when people put all of their energy and effort into the top single, and then either sandbag or skip their volume work or accessories. In my opinion, this is completely backwards. They have missed the forrest for the trees, having skipped the things that actually increase their lift for the sake of testing the lift at a time when it doesn’t matter.

All of this isn’t necessarily the single’s fault, but if we are being pragmatic, including singles year round may not be the best option for everyone if they can’t handle them responsibly.

In Conclusion

There is nothing inherently wrong with taking singles, especially when they are programmed sensibly by the coach and handled responsibly by the athlete. More than that, I would say that any lifter who isn’t at least practicing heavy singles in the weeks close to a competition is doing themselves a disservice.

However, the notion that every lifter should be taking singles on all comp lifts year-round is a bit of an oversimplification. It is an approach that CAN be used and used very effectively with some lifters. For others however, they will require a wider variety of protocols and intensities to see their best progress.