It was another great week of paying my oblations to Fe.
We skipped Saturday conditioning for the third week in a row, but this time we had a better excuse than "it is raining" and "we're tired/sore/injured." My workout partner (along with my brother-in-law and father-in-law) was gracious enough to help us (start to) put up a fence! We made great progress and got some good physical labor in, so it wasn't a total loss.
We're back to exclusively squatting with the safety bar, which makes me exceedingly unhappy. Everything else seems to be going swimmingly, however, so I am dealing with it. I did a small reset to work on getting my knee form back on point. I have virtually always had an issue with knee caving, and it needs to stop so I don't cause permanent injury - which, based on how I have been feeling, can't be too far away.
The elbow is constantly threatening to be problematic, but it didn't prevent me from completing any reps.
The second week of 12 rep DLs was Glorious! I feel amazing for hours afterwards due to the psychological and hormonal benefits of compounding lifting heavy(ish) weights for several reps.
Press progress has finally slowed to the point where I feel like I am done with 5x5 and will move back to 3x5 with the occasional back-off set or two afterwards. I may get a dip station and do some dips after Press on days when I don't do back-off sets. We did some back-off sets this week, and I was disappointed in how few reps I could do on them. I subtracted 20 pounds and only gained 3 reps on the first set, and subsequently unloaded an additional 20 pounds and only gained 3 more reps for the final set.
Chins are still progressing - I can't put into words how encouraging it is that I am improving with chins. I added weight for the work-sets on Friday and am doing the slow descent where the first eccentric movement takes as long in seconds as there are reps in the set. The second eccentric takes one fewer second, and so forth. For example: Friday, I did 5 sets of 5 reps. I do a chin-up, and then slowly lower my body back down for a count of 5 seconds. I then perform another chin-up, and slowly lower my body back down for a count of 4 seconds... and so on until the final chin-up is followed by a one second eccentric.
When I came back to the Iron near the beginning of this year, I got a 1RM of 225 on the Bench Press. This week, I got a set of 225x5. I am VERY pleased with this. Next week, 3x5@225 should go in the books.
My favorite part of this week was the introduction of dumbbell bench press. I got my hands on some used 80lb dumbbells for pretty cheap, and we cut our barbell bench sets to 2x5 so we could have a little extra time to do 2xFail on dumbbell bench. I could really feel a pump in my boobies, and it was pretty sore yesterday and today. Yay for hypertrophy!
6.22.15
Squat 250x5; 270x5,5
Bench 2x2@235; 217.5x5,5,6
Rows 190x5,5,6
Chins BWx11,9,9; +10x5
6.24.15
DL 375x5; 315x12
Press 155x5,5,5; 135x8; 115x11
Chins BWx10,10,10; +10x5
6.26.15
Squat 3x5@275
Bench 240x2; 250x1; 220x6; 225x5
D.Bell Bench 80s x 10,8
Rows 3x5@192.5
Chins +5x5,5,5,5,5
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