Wolverine in Durata: when the training max goes up by a percentage

Finding it and starting it

The finder asks what you are training for, how long you have been at it and how many days a week you can commit. Five days and a strength goal bring Wolverine back near the top. It is also findable by name: the catalogue answers to Kingsbury and to the Hugh Jackman search that most people actually type.

The program page shows the five-day week and the shape of the wave before you commit to anything, which is worth reading here because the four weeks are not interchangeable.

Setup asks for two kinds of number. The five main lifts each need a training max, which Kingsbury defines the same way 5/3/1 does, at ninety percent of a true one-rep max. The accessories need an ordinary working weight: this run opened the front squat at 80 kg, the dumbbell overhead press volume work at 20 kg, and the small isolation lifts at 7.5 kg.

Four weeks, and none of them are the same

Each main lift runs the same four-week wave. Week one is four sets of five, week two four sets of four, week three four sets of three, and week four is a deload at four sets of ten on a much lighter bar. Every one of those weights is a percentage of the training max, worked out before the block starts.

The sessions ramp rather than sitting on one number. A working set is preceded by lighter percentage steps of the same lift, so the top set arrives on a bar you have already been under twice that day.

The five main lifts sit one per day: bench on day one, squat on day two, weighted pull-ups on day three, dumbbell overhead press on day four, deadlift on day five. Everything else in the session is accessory work on the ordinary double-progression rule, which is the same rule the rest of the catalogue uses.

Pick a start date and the whole sixteen weeks lands on the calendar in one go.

Inside the first wave

The squat opened on a 140 kg training max. Week one puts seventy-five percent of that number on the bar for four sets of five, deliberately submaximal. Nothing about the first week is meant to be hard.

The session card totals it before saving: four working sets, twenty reps, 1950 kg moved. That is the whole point of the low week, a lot of quality reps at a weight that leaves plenty behind.

The History calendar starts filling five entries a week, and because every main lift is on its own day, the weekly pattern is legible immediately.

The triple week, then the drop

Week three is where the wave peaks. The squat ramps to 125 kg, ninety percent of the training max, for the heaviest triples of the cycle. It is the closest the program comes to a test, and it is still not a max attempt.

Then week four takes the bar back down to 85 kg for sets of ten. That is a large drop by design, not a bad week. The deload is doing the work of making the next wave possible, and the app prescribes it with the same confidence it prescribes the heavy week.

Neither of those weights is a response to how week three felt. Both were computed from the training max before the block began, which is the trade this style of program makes: you give up in-session judgement and you get a plan that does not negotiate with a bad night's sleep.

The review is a percentage, and it shows

At the end of the wave the training max is reviewed, and this is where Wolverine parts company with the programs it resembles. The lower-body lifts go up ten percent and the upper-body lifts five percent. Not a fixed step, a proportion of what is already there.

The squat's training max went from 140 kg to 155 kg on the first review, and cycle two opened the identical wave on a correspondingly heavier bar. Same weeks, same percentages, bigger numbers underneath them.

Across four reviews the difference between lifts becomes the story. The squat's training max travelled from 140 kg to 207.5 kg and the deadlift's from 180 kg to 265 kg. Over the same four reviews the bench press went from 100 kg to 120 kg and the weighted pull-up from 80 kg to 100 kg. A percentage of a big number is a big number.

The dumbbell overhead press shows the other edge of the same rule. Five percent of 25 kg is barely more than a kilogram, and there is no dumbbell that small, so each review rounds up to the next pair on the rack and the lift finished the block at 35 kg. On the smallest lift in the program, rounding does more work than the percentage does.

What moved, and what held

By the last triple week the squat was ramping to 170 kg off a 187.5 kg training max, and a fourth review took that training max to 207.5 kg for a fifth wave that this drive did not run. The estimated one-rep max chart shows the shape clearly: four climbs, four dips at the deload, each one starting higher than the last peak.

The accessories are the counterweight. Every double-progression lift in the program finished the sixteen weeks on the weight it started: the front squat at 80 kg, the bent-over row at 65 kg, the incline bench at 60 kg, the Romanian deadlift at 77.5 kg, the single-leg press and the skullcrusher at 20 kg, and the curls, raises, flyes and pushdowns at 7.5 kg.

That is the double-progression rule behind a heavy main lift, on four sets of ten to twelve, five days a week. A lift only moves when every working set reaches the top of its range, and none of them did across sixteen weeks of chasing five main lifts up a percentage ladder.

It is worth knowing which half of this program is designed to move. The main lifts are, on a schedule. The accessory work holds position while that happens, and the recap card and strength index report both halves without flattering either.

The payoff: 125 kg to 170 kg, four waves apart

Two screenshots of the same week in the wave, sixteen weeks apart. The squat's heaviest triple went from 125 kg in the first cycle to 170 kg in the fourth, and every weight in between was computed from a training max that was reviewed four times and never argued with.

Nobody decided to add 45 kg to a squat. Four ten-percent reviews did, one wave at a time, and the app put the resulting weight on the screen each time the session came round.

Wave 1

125 kg → 170 kg

+45 kg

The same week of the same wave, four cycles apart, with every weight computed from a training max the app reviewed on its own.

Wave 4