This week had some good sessions and a lot of disasters in the gym. Lots of lessons were learned and progress was made. Scroll to the end to read about the lessons, my analysis and more. First however, the workouts.
2/27/22 Dynamic Effort Lower
Safety Squat Bar Speed Squat
245 x 2 – 10 sets
Speed Deadlifts Conventional
225 x 2 – 5 sets
Worked up to:
335 x 1
405 x 1
Belt Squat
180 x 3
180 x 4
Reverse Hypers
185 x 12 – 4 sets
Deep Box Squats
Did these with bodyweight for 3 sets of 6.
Light Laying Leg Curls -Did Some.
Pulldown Abs
60 x 15
60 x 15
60 x 15
My quads really didn’t feel like I could fire them during this workout. Quads will need a lot of work.
2/28/22 Dynamic Effort Upper
DB Incline Bench
60 x 5
70 x 8
Speed Bench Press
175 x 3 – 8 Sets. (This felt too heavy and was moving slow)
Work up singles.
205 x 1
225 x 1
Tate Press
45 x 8
45 x 6
Pulldowns – Did a lot.
DB Shoulder Press
30 x 10
55 x 4 (Lat Popped here)
Lateral Raises – Some
Facepulls – Some
Cable Rows – Some
Hammer Curls – Some
Leg Raises
12, 10
Was hard to set up tight on bench. Back was really spent from lower body day on prior day.
3/2/22 Max Effort Lower
Sumo Deadlift
445 x 1
500 x 1 (Lifetime Deadlift PR)
Close Stance Lift
225 x 3
225 x 5
225 x 5
Walking lunges – 1 long trip
Reverse Hypers
190 x 12 – 4 sets
Pulldown Abs
60 x 15
60 x 15
60 x 15
Laying Leg Curls – Some
Seated Hip Abduction With Band – Some.
3/4/22 Max Effort Upper
Shoulder and Triceps are all jacked up.
Shoulder Saver Pad Bench Press
185 x 1
205 x 1 (quit here and was smart)
Pushups
10, 10
Barbell Rows
135 x 8
225 x 7
225 x 5
Chest Support Row Machine
180 x 8
90 x 10
90 x 10
90 x 10
Cable Rows – Some (focused on scapular movement on these)
DB Shrugs
60 x 10
60 x 10
60 x 10
Facepulls- Lots
Trouble setting shoulders again on bench. Need to work posture and remove fatigue.
Analysis
My upper body training felt like garbage this week. My tendonitis issues in the right triceps have creeped back in. My shoulder has also been giving me pain. I feel as though I am reaching a point with my training that if I can keep healthy then my strength will be there. Not getting beat up has become the number one priority with my upper body training. I have tactics to keep healthy I must now simply prioritize them.
Once cause of these junky shoulders is that my back muscles have not kept pace with my chest and delts. My shoulders have rolled far more forward than is optimal. This is a problem I can fix. I have figured out a simple plan for this.
- Do more pushups. These train the serratus and really help with my shoulder health. In general the more of these I work in the healthier I feel.
- I should start doing targeted rotator cuff work. I usually just throw this stuff in for a couple sets here and there. I think short extra workouts for these might be the way to go in the future. I am already in the gym all the time anyways so throwing this stuff in in a 10 minute workout shouldn’t be that big of a deal.
- I think I am going to start pushing barbell rows and other back exercises harder and get stronger at them.
- I am working to remove overall fatigue more to be able to better contract my lats on pressing exercises. Currently I have been digging myself into a real fatigue hole. I can fix that.
My hope is that these measures will improve my shoulder health enough to keep training the bench press moderately hard. I don’t want to have to escalate to talking to doctors about this. As weird as the bench press and upper body training is going for me, my lower body training is going good.
This week I hit my first 500 pound deadlift. So it was a good training week alone off of that alone. I hit that lift on March 2nd. On December 31st my max deadlift was 430 pounds. I bring that up because the 430 was a lifetime PR, and two months later I have added 70 pounds to a lifetime PR. This is a really good rate of improvement, especially given my age and how long I have been training. This merits a bit of analysis, because I think there are some takeaways here. So what do I credit with this fast improvement?
I have been taking a few more heavy deadlifts in training. Training specificity does matter and I have been working up to heavier deadlifts more often in my training. I feel like this is definitely improving my comfort level with the heavy weights. I have just been sprinkling a few more heavy lifts into my training and I think this is helping. This is not what I believe is the biggest reason though for my improvement.
The biggest reason for my improvement is that I can tell is that I have been hitting the reverse hyper machine very hard. I have been doing 4 hard reverse hyper sets as part of most leg workouts. I also use reverse hypers for around 3-4 sets as warmup for a lot of my workouts. I just have been doing a lot of reverse hypers. This is making my back very strong and helping with my overall bracing. I really credit this focus on posterior chain development as bringing up my deadlift so fast. I didn’t have a reverse hyper until now and am obviously benefiting from it.
This fact does bring up a point of criticism with my own training. I have been using the reverse hyper to bring up my posterior chain. This machine has made it very easy for me to do so. Before I had this machine though, I should have been finding a way to bring up my posterior chain. I had a lot of tools to get this job done. I was not diligent enough with my pursuit of strength though. A mixture of Romanian deadlifts, pull throughs, back raises and other exercises could have gotten this job done. This would have taken some thought to get the mix right though. The Reverse Hyper Machine has been easy though, I just hop on it and do some work. This has gotten me results, but also exposed how lazy I can be about my training. I wasn’t stuck with a deadlift before, I was stuck in my ways of thinking. I really wasn’t thinking at all to be honest.
That being said I have the intention to just ride this reverse hyper wave as far as I can. I know I can get a lot stronger at them in the coming months. I am eager to see if that will drive my deadlift up even more. This experiment will be fun and teach me even more about training. I can do more weight but I had to back off because I was accumulating too much fatigue by improving too fast them.
I was increasing my reverse hypers workload so fast that in like a 2 week period I more than doubled my workload. This lead to some massive fatigue issues. I have backed off though and planning to add more volume in slowly in the future. I have gotten good results from the current training volume I am doing but I got very greedy. I thought I could just push the volume and get gains even more faster, this was a mistake and really messed me up from a fatigue standpoint. As I stated before I’ve been making very good progress. I should have been happy with that and just rode that out, but I got stupid. I would encourage you not to get stupid like that.
So that was my week of training. Next up is a bit of a deload and plotting how to go onwards and upwards.