Deadlift, to me, at 1x5, needs to go on the first lower day. It's maximal work. Matter of fact your first lower should be you first workout of the week and especially if you're doing deadlift. Different people may have differnet opinions depending on what aspect of recovery they focus on.
Look, you want strength, you want functionality, and you want health. But in the way you arrange the workouts you are still thinking like a bodybuilder. You want to "prioritize" muscles.
To some extent you can do that but there is an order of importance to look at in the way you arrange things.
I'll list out those things in order but first a little explanation.
Just about everything centers around recovery. Most people are stuck in a rut of thinking about recovery in terms of local muscular recovery. They worry about whether their chest is recovered, or their legs, or their arms. You hear it all the time...my legs were too tired to squat. That statement there is a dead giveaway that a person doesn't know shit about programming.
The recovery we really need to worry about is systemic in nature. It involves the entire system and the CNS is one of the biggest parts of it. There are only so many resources to go around and those include the resources of your nervous system not just your muscles themselves. Fatigue plays into all this. Keeping this in mind helps us decide what to do first and the general order things should happen in.
So the first thing we think of is nervous resources. The more complex and heavy a movement the more resources it demands from the CNS. You don't even need to worry about the relative nature of the fatigue they cause because just that fact will tell you that the more complex and heavy movements should come first...when the CNS is freshest. This would obviously mean a time when residual fatigue from the entire routine is at it's lowest so you put the more complex movements where your body has the most resources to pull them off.
Deadlifts, in your routine, would be the most complex, demanding movement. When I say complex I don't necessarily mean how much skill it takes, I mean how much minute muscular control you body has to call on to do the movement. Obviously, the nature of it changes as we get stronger and the CNS matures, but there comes a time where the deadlift needs to be at the top of the list if you expect to do it right.
Deads of course cause a lot of metabolic fatigue so that may lead some people to want to push it further into the weak. But if the volume is not too high the fatige will not be as long lasting at the "volume" fatigue. And in any case the need to be at your freshest to prevent injury and any number of other problems (such as the problem you got from Doggshit training) outweighs any other consideration. This is why I had said a 5x5 is not a good routine to bring up your deadlifts if you are having problems because in order to do that squats would have to give ground.
So this all tells us where in the weak heavy deads should go and it also tells us the exercise order. Remember, most complex first. So that means you would never do squats before deads if you really know what you are doing. You would most certainly never do high volume squats. Deads is just NOT a movement that is going to be understanding if you care more about squats or bench press. It's just not.
But you're probably thinking I can still do upper day first, right? Wrong. Because it's not about muscular recovery. It's about systemic resources. I notice everbody puts the upper first in upper/lowers. Because they think that they'll be too tired to do their precious bench press if they do the lower first in the week. So they actually understand intuitively about systemic resources, but they don't take this logic to it's conclusion.
They simply care more about their pecs. That ain't strength triaining. There is no logical reason to put upper first when lower is the most complex. The upper day movements are less complex therefore they require fewer resources. That means your bench won't suffer as much from your deadlift (and squat) as your deadlift will suffer from you bench. The best thing to do is to also arrange the day's off in a way that gives more recovery from the draining nature of deads.
That is why I do upper lowers like this: Lower, day off, upper, lower, day off, upper. Then two days off for an eight day week.
So here are the things to consider when arranging the routine in order of importance.
1. Most complex and heavy movements first
2. Lighter and higher volume second.
3. Priorities based on weaknesses, injuries, postural problems, etc.
Putting in deadlifts changes everything. It really becomes a different routine becasue everything must shift around the exercise. If it were a matter of your deadlift not having problems it would be different but if you want to improve on it you have to be willing to give it it's due.
You could keep doing the kind of thing you are doing and then you might actually find some improved capacity for bringing it up in your next routine. But if you want to put it in now, which is good as far as I'm concerned, you need to be willing to change priorities.
Let me know what you think and I will help.
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