I actually designed a routine for myself a couple years back pretty much identical to what you just described. I never ran it but have been thinking about doing it lately, kind of funny that you're bringing up the same general idea. I'm probably going to go ahead with it as a way to get back into the three core lifts. I have squat day on Monday, bench Wednesday and deads Friday, along with accessory lifts. What sort of volume would you do with that? I was leaning toward lower reps and higher loads on the core lifts and higher volume with moderate loads for accessories. My original routine was planned for 3x5 on core lifts and 25 total reps for each accessory lift.
Very cool. I am just running a 4 day split since I figured that was slightly more bro-tastic.
There are definitely different ways to play this. One would be to literally look up the linear/western periodization schemes those dudes used for guidance, they are still out there on the interwebs. A while back I came across the "5,5,5+" idea I originally saw proposed by Johnny Pain, basically a variant of the 3 sets of 5, just that the last set winds up a rep out set. At the beginning of cycles (maybe starting in the ~12-10 RM range), the two sets of 5 basically wind up heavy warmup sets, with only one set kind of close to failure. By the end of the cycle, however, you wind up with 3 heavy work sets of 5. Resets, then, are as simple as resetting the loads like ~10-15% or whatever. I liked this concept because resets no longer are psychologically problematic - even with lower loads, you get a chance to set new rep PR's in the lighter range, rather than waiting around weeks/months to hit new PR's. It's a very elegant way of handling things. The only downside to this, obviously, is that if you're training nearer failure, you probably aren't hitting a lift more than once (or at most twice) a week.
That said, there are certainly other ways. %-based lifts and something more akin to those old-fashioned powerlifting routines would work. You could even take a look at Prilepin's table and just come up with your own sets/reps combinations for something like a 6-8 week cycle.
Accessory work I would probably keep in the slightly higher rep territory, though if you planned in competing you could make a case for at least some of that being heavier (e.g. heavy rack or floor presses for bench, stuff like that). You could wing that to a degree (versus programming hard and fast #'s), i.e. keep the reps higher, train a little closer to failure, and just autoregulate the loads, erring on the side of a little too light at the start of a cycle and then bumping things up week to week based on performance/how you're feeling.
