Madcow 5x5 with 2 days schedule, will it work?

Question

Because of long commute and uncertain work hours, right now I'm only able to workout twice a week. Planning to do madcow.

As I understand there are 3 days in madcow 5x5:

Day 1 is 5x5, day 2 is recovery, day 3 is 3x5 plus a new 3RM.

What Im planning to do is to hit day 1 and 2 in one week, and hit day 3 the week after. And the schedule will rotate from there.

So it will look something like

Week 1; do day 1 on thursday, day 2 on sunday Week 2; day 3 on thursday, day 1 on sunday. And so on

I'm adding hiit with BW squats, pullup, and pushups with their variations in the off days. I want to build up to pistol squats and spiderman pushups. I wonder if this would work...I mean I could just find a 2 day workout.. Although i dont know any that exists

Answer 1

It would work but you need to make sure the "week" is the three workouts, not the calendar week when calculating your increases, if that makes sense.

I'd also dial back the weekly increaese to 1.5%-2.0% .

Check out Rippetoe's "Practical Programming". Really gets into these details, and explains some two day programs. If you're making real strength progress as an intermediate it's a great reference.