I've done 5/3/1 for the past four out of five months. It has been very enjoyable, and is a very clear cut program - a sort of bare-bones, but it works amazingly well. Each month is a cycle with the last week of each month being a deload (which can be skipped a few times). It has progression built in to your core lifts, so that the program can't go stale on account of lack of recovery and therefore can have a longer life than beginner programs. You can start with lower 1 rep maxes as well to get more cycles in before plateauing.
I added about 20lb to each of my lifts, and they were all about to go up with having none stalled. The program can be known as low volume, but that can be fixed through adding Joker sets, which are sets that built up to a PR breaker on any given workout. I've been breaking my PRs all through the Joker sets instead of normal planning - so you can see the potential of the program. I choose to divert from it temporarily to focus on building more muscle.
My weight has gone up as planned, and I'm 199lb at 5'11. The new routine will drop my weight due to the extra workouts, higher reps, and push-up and pull-up total volume weekly. I'll be able to cut down with more muscle than last year. I won't be cutting calories in so much that the extra exercise will eat away at the caloric expenditure.
I've also realized that in chasing my 1 rep max on a daily and weekly basis that my risk of injury was high, and although I focused on muscle contractions, I wasn't getting the volume correlated with the hard facts of higher repetitions for muscle growth. I was thinking of reenacting another of my bodybuilding routines, but I've enjoyed 5/3/1 so much. I believe in its ability to spurt progression, and I know it'll work for other rep schemes. To break an 8 rep PR is rewarding just as a much of a 1 rep max PR. I also felt the higher volume coincides well with the push-up and pull-up high volume programs I'm running. I find that when doing repetitions on any given day that you get used to breathing and counting the reps a certain way, and to change out of that rep scheme would break the flow of concentration.
It's nice running this program now because the first cycle's deload week hits along the week of Christmas. This year in lifting for me has worked out far better than I imagined or planned. In the start of November I broke PRs nonstop every week in all lifts, and have just now devised the next program at a great time as I had been strength training for half the year. I am switching between the two: bodybuilding and strength training. I hit upon 5/3/1 for strength training, and have now just hit upon 8/6/3 for bodybuilding as I was using a good program before for bodybuilding, but it didn't have the same consistently planned route of progression as does the 5/3/1 method. It's a matter of programming a routine with the amount of complexity needed for said lifter. As I look at my lifting career, I've frequently pulled back my perspective to see what I've done and where I want to go.
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