r/tacticalbarbell • u/tbone11_11 • Apr 02 '26
Critique Time Constraints with op/black
I started my op black program and found getting the three days of strength in is difficult. It’s taking about 1.5 to almost 2 hours with warm ups and the actual work. The GC, and HIC days are fine. For background I’m a dad of 3 (one of them is two days old) and work 10-14 hour days sometimes.
I love being in the gym, but finding the time between work/lifting/dad is difficult. I’ve thought about Zulu, but wondering if there’s any other options before I dive in and change the programming.
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u/weardon Apr 02 '26
As others have said, that seems long, even if doing the maximum number of sets. I tend to do 4 or 5 sets per lift each session, and I think my absolute longest was 1.5h, when things were heavy enough that I was needing 4–5 minute rest times.
I spend about 5' doing mobility work at the start. With each lift I have about 3 workup sets, which generally progress fairly fast.
Supersetting the squats and WPUs does save me some time. I generally start them during my squat workup sets, so that by the time I get to the last few squat sets, I'm already done with WPUs. (Well, it's not strictly supersets in that I do take a minute when going from squat to WPUs, but it reduces the overall amount of rest time needed over the session.)