Metallicadpa PPL in Durata: one lift, two rules, the same week

Finding it and starting it

The program finder asks three questions: what you are training for, how experienced you are, and how many days a week you can train. Answer six days and hypertrophy and Metallicadpa PPL comes back at the top of the shortlist.

The program page is the last stop before committing. It carries the schedule, the progression rule and the shape of each session, so the six-day commitment is visible before you take it rather than after.

There are no training maxes to work out here. Every lift runs off a working weight, so the app asks what you can currently do for each one and starts there. This run opened the bench press at 75 kg, the overhead press at 50 kg and the deadlift at 130 kg.

Six days, and two of them share a lift

The week runs Push A, Pull A, Legs A, Push B, Pull B, Legs B. Push A is built around the bench press: four sets of five and a fifth set taken for as many reps as you have, with the overhead press dropping in behind it for three sets of eight to twelve. Push B swaps them. Overhead press takes the four-by-five, and the bench press moves to three sets of eight to twelve.

The pull days do the same thing. Pull A opens with a single all-out deadlift set. Pull B opens with the bent-over row for four sets of five and an AMRAP. The accessories behind them are identical on both days: lat pulldown, seated cable row, five sets of face pulls, then hammer curls and dumbbell curls.

Both leg days are the same session: squat for two sets of five and an AMRAP, then Romanian deadlifts, leg press, lying leg curls and five sets of calf raises. The squat is the only barbell lift that appears twice a week, and that turns out to matter more than anything else in the block.

One more repetition hides inside each push day. The lateral raise is supersetted behind the triceps pushdown and again behind the overhead triceps extension, so it appears twice per push session. The app treats those as two separate slots and gives each its own weight.

Two rules, running side by side

The primary lifts run linear. Complete the prescribed sets and the app adds 2.5 kg to that lift's next appearance. Miss a working set and the weight holds where it is. Miss three times at the same weight and the engine cuts it by ten percent and restarts the climb.

The accessories work the other way round. The weight stays put and the reps climb through a range, and only when every set reaches the top of the range does the weight move and the reps reset to the bottom. The lateral raises and face pulls run a 15 to 20 range; everything else runs 8 to 12.

Both rules are printed on the exercise while you train, on the chip under its name. Tapping the chip opens the case for it: the rule in words, and the history from this exact slot that the rule is being applied to.

That last part is what makes the two-rule week work. Bench press on Push A and bench press on Push B are separate slots with separate histories, so the linear rule reads only the Monday sets and the double-progression rule reads only the Thursday sets. Both opened at 75 kg. Both finished at 80 kg. They got there by completely different routes and neither one knew about the other.

Twice a week is twice the attempts

The squat opened at 100 kg on Legs A and came round again three days later on Legs B. Because both leg days run the same session, the squat got twelve chances to move in a six-week block. A lift trained once a week got six.

That doubles the rate of climb without changing the rule. The squat added 2.5 kg on each of its first four appearances, so by session twelve, four weeks before the block ended, it was already at 107.5 kg with 102.5 kg showing in the previous column.

Nothing about that required a decision. You turn up, the weight is on the screen, and the app has already read the last session to work out what it should be. The end-of-session card totals the work before it saves: every set, the reps and the volume moved.

110 kg, three times

Twelve chances to add weight also means the weight arrives sooner than it would on a once-a-week schedule, and 110 kg is where this squat ran out of room. The working sets came in at three reps instead of five.

Missing any working set makes the whole session a failed one, so the weight held. It held again on the next leg day, and again on the one after that. Three attempts at the same number, three sessions short.

The rule chip is a button, and this is when it earns its place. Tapping it shows the evidence the engine is working from, drawn from that slot's own history, next to the law it is being judged against: two misses recorded at this weight, three misses and the weight gets cut by ten percent.

The cut, and the way back up

The third miss tripped the rule. The engine dropped the squat by ten percent, from 110 kg back to 100 kg, and started the climb again from there. Nobody calculated it and nobody decided it. The rule read the logged sets and applied itself.

From 100 kg the climb ran exactly as it had the first time: 102.5 kg, 105 kg, 107.5 kg, and 110 kg again on the last leg day of the block. Twelve appearances, five weights, one stall and one cut, all of it drawn from the sets that were logged rather than from a plan written in advance.

The sixth week finished with the same lift on the same bar at the same number that stopped it in week three, and with the next session already prescribed at 112.5 kg. The history view shows the shape of the whole thing in one screen: the climb, the flat stretch, the drop and the rebuild.

What moved, and what did not

Across the block the movers were the lifts that appear twice a week. The incline dumbbell press is on both push days and went from 30 kg to 40 kg, the largest gain of any lift in the run. Face pulls, hammer curls and dumbbell curls are on both pull days and all three doubled, 7.5 kg to 15 kg.

Bench press moved in both of its slots, 75 kg to 80 kg as the Monday primary and 75 kg to 80 kg again as the Thursday accessory. The overhead press accessory slot held at 50 kg for the whole block. The squat, the lift with the most appearances of all, finished with 112.5 kg prescribed.

Plenty held still, and that is the honest half of a six-day block. The deadlift stayed at 130 kg: it gets one all-out set once a week, which is six attempts in six weeks and no room for error on any of them. The bent-over row held at 65 kg, the lat pulldown and seated cable row at 65 kg, the Romanian deadlift at 77.5 kg, the leg press at 20 kg, and the lying leg curl and calf raise at 7.5 kg.

One lift went backwards. The lateral raise in the first superset slot started at 7.5 kg and finished at 2.5 kg, because a 15 to 20 rep range on a small dumbbell is unforgiving and the rule cut it rather than let it grind. The same movement in the second slot ran its own separate history, which is the reason the two are tracked apart.

The strength index and the estimated one-rep max chart show the same arc from a different angle: the squat climbing, flattening through the stall, dipping at the deload, then climbing past where it stopped.

The payoff: back to 110 kg the hard way

Two screenshots of the same lift, six weeks apart. The squat opened the block at 100 kg and finished it at 110 kg, having stalled there three times and been cut back to 100 kg in between. The number at the end is only 10 kg above the number at the start, and every step of the route between them was decided by the engine from the sets that were logged.

Session 1

100 kg → 110 kg

+10 kg

Same lift, six weeks apart, with a stall and a deload in between, and the app drove every weight.

Session 36