Ed Coan’s 14 Week Peaking Program with Spreadsheet

After spending years at the gym, peaking becomes difficult for most professional powerlifters. The body becomes too trained to handle weights, requiring more and more stimulus to grow in size and strength.

To compensate for the increasing difficulty, most powerlifters make the mistake of increasing the intensity of their training sessions. To some extent, this might be the right move to get efficient results.

But for a professional, advanced powerlifter, doing so may result in overstressing and exhaustion. Eventually, your body might be too tired to perform after weeks of vigorous training.

One way to avoid this complication is to follow a proper powerlifting program. The schedule should be such that it allows lifters to gain hypertrophy, increase their lifting capabilities, and also give their bodies enough time to rest and recover completely.

To solve this problem, Ed Coan came up with a simple but effective 14-week powerlifting program that focuses on peaking and meet prep training.

Program Principles

The Ed Coan peaking program uses some interesting principles to maximise the effectiveness of the training sessions.

First, it uses the 1-Rep Maximum of powerlifters to determine the starting weights for the program. As such, this specialised peaking program is mostly suitable for advanced and intermediate lifters who know their 1RM capabilities.

Now, as the program favours experienced powerlifters, it should also be able to provide the right kind of stimulus for growth and improvement. The Ed Coan 14-week peaking program achieves this by following the linear periodization training.

In this, the training intensity keeps on increasing with the training volume decreasing after every workout session. The balance provides the right kind of stimulus to the lifter’s body without overexerting it.

To summarise, these are the principles that Ed Coan uses in his popular peaking program to reap maximum benefits:

• Uses 1RM percentage to determine the weights that the powerlifter will use initially.
• The intensity of training will increase while training volume will decrease after each training session, following a linear pattern of workout.
• Only one powerlifting session required one week, allowing the body to come out of the program fresh and fully recovered.

Ed Coan 14 Week Peaking Program

Ed Coan is one of the most popular legends in the world of powerlifting. It’s only natural that his 14-week powerlifting program covers all aspects of how to achieve peak preparedness before a competition or a lifter’s meet.

The program is pretty simple to follow. It starts by calculating the 1RM percentage of the lifter. The initial weight to be used will come at around 60-65% of the lifter’s 1-Rep Maximum.

From thereon, the weight will increase linearly after each workout session. At the same time, the number of repetitions for powerlifting exercises will decrease, keeping a balanced rhythm.

The low-intensity/high-volume and high-intensity/low-volume fluctuations allow the lifter to achieve maximum stimulus while also getting enough rest and recovery in between training sessions.

The ultimate goal of the 14-week powerlifting program is to increase the 1RM of the powerlifter and allow them to enter any competition fully recovered and sharp.

By a rough estimation, the peaking program should help a lifter increase their 1RM by around 5-10%, an impressive figure.

Ed Coan 14 Week Peaking Program Spreadsheet

The Ed Coan peaking program is concise, comprehensive, and easy to understand.

You can download the entire powerlifting program from here.

Once you have the Spreadsheet file with you, you can also look at some additional instructions. For example, the sheet also mentions notes on how to perform warm-up exercises.

Don’t miss:

Ed Coan 12 Week Peaking Program
Ed Coan Deadlift Program
Candito 10 or 14 Week Advanced Deadlift Program
Sheiko Program Spreadsheets

Wrapping Up

The 14-week powerlifting program developed by Ed Coan can help advanced and intermediate lifters overcome their plateaus and increase their 1RM by around 5-10%.

The best part is that powerlifters won’t have to exhaust themselves to achieve such results.