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The original was posted on /r/weightroom by /u/gainitthrowaway1223 on 2025-06-12 19:58:45+00:00.

I don’t see a lot of bodybuilding-focused program reviews here, so I’m hoping this one will be well-received. I know GVS generally has a solid reputation in some of the bodybuilding subs, but in my opinion he’s somewhat of an underrepresented individual in this space. I don’t agree with absolutely everything he does/says, but after running this program of his, it’s difficult to argue that his methods don’t work.

TL;DR - made some of the best gains in my life in as little as eight weeks

Background

I’m a 29-year old male (30 in a couple months) with a background in track & field and rugby from high school. Since then, I’ve focused pretty much entirely to lifting. I don’t compete in anything, but my training over the years has been very solidly powerlifting-focused. I’ve been lifting off-and-on since my track days in high school. I got serious with strength training a couple years after that, though, but I would go through spurts of focusing heavily on lifting, then either switching focus to other hobbies for a while or just not having time in the day to go to the gym for whatever reason. I would estimate my total training age to be approximately five years.

As far as my life outside of the gym, I work from home, have access to a home gym with a power rack, platform, barbell, adjustable dumbbells, SSB, and some other goodies here and there, and I also have a free membership to a local gym because I coach there. I am incredibly fortunate to have this level of flexibility and variety in how, where, and what I train.

Programs I’ve run include Fierce 5 (the first program I ran out of high school), nSun’s, various GZCL programs (GZCLP, J&T 2.0, General Gainz), and a whole bunch of cycles of Greg Nuckols’ 28 free programs, which I had been running on a harsh cut immediately before beginning Recovering Powerlifters. Speaking of which, here are my stats the day I started this:

Lifetime PRs were hit about a month before the current numbers. Lost some strength due to the cut. Not that these numbers really matter, but hopefully they give you a sense of where I was at.

The Program

I’m not going to go into too much detail here. The program is available for free on Boostcamp; however, I prefer using Google Sheets for my programming, so I followed the instructions in GVS’ video on the program and made my own spreadsheet for it.

In summary, however, Recovering Powerlifters is a 12-week bodybuilding program with emphasis on common weak points in the physique of a strength-based athlete like myself. It is ran 5 days a week, with three upper body days and two lower body days, and contains heavy emphasis on arms and delts (one of the upper body days is entirely arm and delt movements) which is great because mine are/were absolutely tiny and shapeless from years of focusing on SBD.

I generally kept to the program as written, opting to drop SBD almost entirely. I swapped a couple exercises out for other exercises out of preference or due to equipment availability on the days I trained at home. As time went on, I also swapped out a few exercises here and there if I either got bored of them or felt they weren’t doing much for me. About the only “powerlifting” movement I kept in for the duration of the program was SSB squats one day a week.

I would consider this to be a moderate-volume, high-intensity program, at least how I ran it; every single set was taken at a minimum one rep away from failure. There were times that I recognized I sandbagged a set - if that happened, I would do one extra set and make sure I pushed myself as hard as I could. That being said, I’m confident that the vast majority of my work was done at, or at least very near failure.

There isn’t really a clear progression scheme like you would find in most strength programs. I basically just increased the weight if I reached the highest point of the prescribed rep range on the first set. GVS does incorporate autoregulation in the form of adding a set if you feel good - I used this option to add a set if I couldn’t add a rep from the previous week. I felt this really helped push the progression, though it’s not necessarily part of the program to do so.

The Diet

My eating started off very consistent, but kinda ended up all over the place; more on that later.

My aim here was to gain as much lean mass as possible, while minimizing body fat gain. Skip to the Results section for details on how that went. I aimed for an average rate of gain of about half a pound a week - however, I don’t count calories because that’s boring and instead relied on how the scale was moving to inform my eating. I overshot my weight gain goals a bit, but I’m not unhappy about that.

There were two things I consumed almost every single day from the start of the program: Greek yogurt with chocolate protein powder & granola (literally tastes like chocolate pudding), and two cups of ultrafiltered chocolate milk. As time went on I needed to add some extra calories, so I added things like trail mix, PB&J’s, smoothies, and so on. For lunches and dinners, I usually did some sort of meal prep where I would cook a whole bunch of protein (braised beef or pork is a favorite of mine for this), cut up and freeze a rotisserie chicken, wash and cut a bunch of veggies, and so on, then my wife and I could make a bunch of different kinds of wraps, bowls, sandwiches, and so on. This has been working well for us, as she’s been working and studying and my work hours go into the evenings, so we can’t really make dinners together often.

That being said, all this kind fell apart around week 9-10 because we added a puppy to the family, and as it turns out puppies are a lot of work and take up a lot of time and attention.

The Process

The initially adjustment to the very high-intensity training style that I did here took some getting used to. That being said, I’ve never felt like I’ve earned my progress more than I have running this program. Some of the days were brutal (especially the leg days - Bulgarian split squats to failure friggin’ suck, dude), but the rate at which I progressed proved to me that in the past years, I just haven’t been training hard enough. That was kind of a bitter pill to swallow, but one that was much needed.

On occasion I did have to cut workouts short for whatever reason, but I didn’t feel this impacted my progress significantly.

Everything went really, really well, up until the point where we picked up our puppy. I took that first week with him off, and in the second week I returned to do some quick workouts in the home gym. Then, in the last week of the program, I injured my neck (unrelated to lifting) and took a few days off again while I focused on getting it back into reasonable shape. All this, combined with kinda crappy eating, resulted in lackluster progress in the last few weeks of the program.

That being said, I consistently got stronger across pretty much every single movement I did throughout the program, even on my SSB squats, which I added about 30lbs to over the 12 weeks. If I couldn’t match reps from the previous week, adding an extra set was always enough to push my progress.

The Results

This section is gonna be a little bit different. I don’t have any lift numbers I’m going to share. However, with the help of this calculator from Stronger By Science, I tracked my changes in weight, lean body mass, fat mass, and body fat percentage for every single week of the program. Every four weeks, I also took whole-body measurements to see how much I was growing. You can find that spreadsheet here. I even made a page for Imperial for all you freedom lovers out there.

In short, I peaked around week 9-10 (which is right before we got the puppy) and declined overall somewhat after that point due to all the factors I already discussed. See the table below for a summary of the results up to the end of week 12:

I gained 8-10 pounds of lean mass, added about an inch to my arms, about two inches to my shoulders, and only added about 1.5 percent to my bodyfat (and even then, a lot of that increase came from the last couple weeks when I started eating like crap).

Disclaimer: I know these numbers may be very approximate; that being said, I feel confident in their general accuracy.

I didn’t take many physique photos (almost entirely be…

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