Does my bum look big in this squat rack?

Forgot to mention training! Lol.

Anyway I'm just preparing myself for when my new bar arrives in the next few days. Have benched/squatted/pulled with the bent bar the last few sessions. It feels horrible. Aside from being bent it isn't even bent evenly so one side hands 2 inches lower than the other.

Benched 137.5kg the other day with a nice pause so that's ok. Squat and deadlift feel very weird after the extended break but I squatted 225 x 1 at lunch today follwed by 2 singles at 215. Did some high bar squats with 140 for loads of sets of 4 afterwards just to get some leg action going and give my elbows a break. The bent bar actually excacerbates the elbow pain from low bar squatting which is not gas.

I tried zercher squatting off the safeties from the very bottom position to try out a potential ME exercise to cycle in there. Managed 160kg for a single, the limiting factor being my arms were bleeding and my forearms were in danger of snapping at that point. I'm sure I'll get used to it though and refuse to wrap a towel around the bar. No good can come from wrapping a towel around a bar. If you ever do that it's time to give up training and take up rollerblading or something.

The zerchers off safeties really hit your middle and upper back which is weakpoint of mine so they get my seal of approval.

Ok update. Only started writing down my numbers again this week. The weeks up to now have really just been about trying to recover the strength I lost with the month off.

I'm desperately trying to achieve the overtrainings. I think my body's capacity for heavy training may be much higher than my stupid brain tells me it is. I've been lifting heavy, ususually including a 1rm, in the bench, sumo, and squat every week and sometimes multiple times a week. On days I don't feel up to atempting a new increased 1rm I just do heavy volume stuff.

Switched back to sumo stance for pulls for a number of reasons. My hip/glute/lower back issues are much improved but I still have that favouring of my right side doing the work. I can control it on squats and make sure I'm evenly distributing the effort but on heavy conventional deadlifts I can't and subsequently I'm treading close to the injury line all the time. So screw it I'm marginally weaker at sumos but over time I can hopefully overtake and get them stronger. They also pose no injury risk compared to convo pulls.

To give an idea of numbers at the moment:

Bench: Hit 142.5kg for a paused single the other day. That's a PR given my 145kg was touch and go. Trying to make sure I keep a decent pause. Strategy here is to bench at least twice a week and follow up competition benches with pin presses from chest height (dead bench) and overloaded lockouts from higher pins which are probably similar to floor presses. Working on benching as much as possible with the stretch reflex as possible. Anything else is ego.

Squat: Hit 235kg for a handy single the other day. Last night was meant to be a 140kg attempt but felt crappy on 220kg so I did 5 singles with that weight and took 170kg for 11 reps. I'd done 170 for 10 the previous week so just trying to make slight improvements where I can.

170 x 12 is kind of a magic number for me, I've done it before I think but it's kind of an indicator set. The reason is this:



I remember spotting that and I had literally just hit 170kg x1 for a new PR. Hanley then came in and repped it 12 times the bollox. He was was rep-monster at that stage but for some reason it sticks in my head. My pose at the end of the video says it all, laughing away and having the craic then I just stop, put my hand son my hips and stare at the bar and I was thinking "Jesus I've a long way to go". Well I'm there now so f**k you Jesus!

Deadlift: Sumo as I said above. 230 for a single the other night . Trying to do plenty of sets of 5 and high volume stuff like 7 sets of 2 in these. Dunno why. It seems like a good way to overtrain.

COH wrote: »

You sir, are an animal.

Screw it. Nothing worse than being frustratingly undertrained. This way next time life prevents me training for 3 or 4 days in a row it may actually serve as a useful recovery period from what I put in when my life isn't a big ball of weighlifting style emo.

Training as hard as I can as often as I can seems to be working. Wednesday nights session included a paused bench PR (145kg) and a sumo PR (240kg) within 15 mins of eachother. The remainder of the evening involved nutella and bagels and nom.

Going back to serious carb back-loading for the last week through to November for the comp. Need to come in sub 100kg.

First session in Revolution this Sunday. Can't wait to test out the equipment. Will make an attempt at a 240kg squat this weekend, might do it Saturday in the shed and bench in Revolution or might take a day off Saturday and put the squat on the chalkboard there to see if I can taunt Hanley out of retirement.

Hanley wrote: »

Well that was fun... I feel like I now need a plan to get strong again.

Yep good to have people other than spiders to talk to.

Trained in Revolution today. Benched 125kg for several sets of moderate reps then sumo pulls, 205 for 7 doubles.

Awesome place, racks and benches and bars are all top quality. So much different to my rattly now severely brain damaged rack. My hands are actually raw after the deadlifting, the knurling on the bar is that sharp. Seriously looking forward to training there.

The buddhists next door weren't happy with the noise of my deadlifts. Apparently repeated ground shaking and shouting "WOOOO!!! How you like me now!!!" aren't conducive to achieving a Zen like state. Then one of them came in and told us that the best way to deadlift was to start at the top. A fascinating insight if not a little mysterious, nearly as mysterious as to how he manged to find a pair of Dingo jeans in 2012.

In any case here's a video of same yoga master eating putrified meat.



That's not a joke by the way.

Update so far, Squat 240 x 1 2 weeks ago, also hit that 170x12 I had targeted and upped the weight to 180 and got 10.

On Sumos I pulled 245 x 1 and am keeping up the habit of pulling after benching. Except for this week when my right hip was sore after a work golf day because I'm old and boring and totally not hardcore. If I could hit a fairway I would have been in with a chance of winning the longest drive though /olddude.

Bench, got crushed twice under 147.5 in the past fortnight. Need to pair back and just concentrate on dead bench for singles and stuff. Bench progress always tends to end in earth shattering failure and complete loss of strength.

In bodyweight terms, I'm fat. I fueled myself mainly on dinner boxes last week and whilst I'd been holding steady at 16 stone 4 (wife keeps switching the scales from kgs and I'm too lazy (fat) to switch it back) this morning I was 16 stone 11.5!! Whopper!

So I didn't eat carbs today, that should be enough.

Wednesday in RevFit was a missed 140kg bench which was annoying but par for my latest bench downturn. Just need to time an upturn for November.

Sumo'd 200kg for a set of 6 followed by a set of 4 before having to run out of the place to get to a meeting while the two "entrepreneurs" hung around comparing who's shorts had the most aggressive slogans.

Trained in the shed last night and felt utterly crap going into it. Couldn't get fired up for any of my warmup squats. Add Rammstein...

Tonight in le shed.

215kg squat 5x5. This is a long video showing me slightly losing my mind at times and struggling to finish pretty much every set. I left absolutely nothing in that shed tonight. Delighted to get it on video. There may be some dancing and some posing. I'm sorry. I also burst a blood vessel on my chest. Either that or I have super-skin cancer because there's a giant mole where there was none 4 hours ago.

Spent the last few weeks getting used to wraps on squats. Immensely frustrating but starting to get some carryover. 240x3 without too much stress on the 3rd rep this week and my sumos seem to be in good shape as per below which was also this week. With those two sessions in the bag the third session of the week was without doubt the biggest puss-out of a session I've ever had. Myself and Hanley just held eachother for an hour then went home.

Hanley wrote: »

I'm a very serious here - would you consider doing that professional shoot with me on December 1st?

I'll still be a mess by then. How much chub am I gonna lose in 25 days?? I have a suitably depressing "before" photo from yesterday but reckon I need 2 months-ish. 6 weeks anyway.

Monthly update!

So I've been carb-less since my previous post. At this stage it's practically impossible to avoid them so the diet came off the rails what with work events and Xmassy stuff that revolves around food. I hit 101kg on the last proper carb-less day at the end of last week.

Training was all high intensity low volume (a lot of weight lifted not very many times) and my lifts were mainly sumos, bench and front squats (to rest my elbows really, and for the sake of change).

I managed a 240kg x 3 sumo and a a 145kg x 1 bench last week so the strength seems to be ok. Best front squat was 145kg x 3. I'm sure my reg squat is in the toilet now after the break but whatever I know how to get it back. Apply pain to squat, PR.

Now that there are carbs back in the system I'm going to jump on Hanley's GVT buzz and go for hypertrophy until at least the end of January before turning back into a powerlifter. Hopefully one with better body composition.

So far I've had 2 GVT sessions. Bench, 80kg for 10 sets of 10 (attempted) reps and Sumos, 130kg for 10 sets of 10 (attempted). 60 secs rest between sets.

Of course I couldn't manage 10 reps on all sets which is contrary to Hanley who is starting lower and aiming for 100 reps. Interesting to see how we get on.

This is my new "go to" song for heavy lifting. I'm worried about why.

Xmas period of ludicrous calorie intake is over, got as many GVT sessions in as I could. Seemed to do a good job of putting the calories to work. I'm thoroughly fed up of being fat though. Weight held at 103kg so that's not bad but I need to get down below 100kg, probably 95kg for my belly fat to be acceptable.

Dieting pre-xmas was possibly the most boring and unsatisfying experience of my life so to hell with that I'm going to just run and jump and stuff while I concentrate on the powerlifts and start gettng back into the groove of them.

I just can't commit to solely powerlifting or mass building type training until this fat situation is sorted. Think it's the fact that I'm about to turn 33 and I'm fatter than I want that keep nagging me. So the fat has to go and I want to keep my strength up.

I really need a goal or I won't keep this lark up so I might look to do a triathlon or something over the summer and then get a 300kg squat by Xmas .

Hanley has spent the last several years coming up with ways of torturing people anaerobically so it would be rude not to give some of his ideas a go. He can point and laugh at me too.

Stand by for hilarity.

Ran some, cycled some, lifted some.

GVT session with 120kg wide stance back squats yesterday. Previous days included 4.7k run in 27 mins and 24k cycle in 70 mins.

Muhammed on rollerskates, back squats change everything. GVT'ing front squats just doesn't cause the same amount of discomfort. Failure comes about too easily with front squats. With back squats, when you hit failure you've still go 2 reps left in you if you can control your girliness for 30 seconds. Doing 10 sets of that has caused me to have a personal crisis on the damp chalky floor of my shed. Followed it up with wide grip 80kg benches (GVT). Finished the session off with Franley, 5 minutes 17 seconds. The GVT squatting banjaxed the BW squats so an assault on my previous all time best at this is on.

In the morning... I will run 5k in sub 25 mins.

Throwing all this pain at myself is great, I'm going to try and keep this log more up to date and create a shrine to overtraining if possible.

A great analogy I read this week about training and resting and "training smart". It's was in reference to Dave Scott, the Ironman, and it compared the body adapting to training to evolution which is adaptation on a grand scale. One of the pillars of evolution is that species under most stress and greatest threat of extinction adapt quickest. Evolution and adaptation speed up when more stress is applied.

Dave Scott trained like a madman. No heart rate monitor. No rest days. Went past the point of burnout and emerged from it like a sinewy phoenix.

Really people need rest days not because their body is telling them to but because their brain is. Your brain has two choices, convince you to stop or tell your body to adapt.

Don't stop.

Stupid brain.

I half wrote an entry about 4 times, so many updates.

Here's an overview of my last month or so.

Wifepants is pregnant - yay - but there are a few complications that we need to watch- boo.
I applied for voluntary redundancy in my job, was one of only 3% of staff who were rejected, endured a few weeks of arguing my case to no avail, resigned. Start new job in a month. - yay.

Got the Norovirus last week - boo. Simultaneosly excreted every mineral from both ends of me for a day and took a week before I stopped feeling like I had been hit by a bus. Got back to squatting/deadlifting this week and managed small improvements over the week before the virus. Nice.

Weight is now down to almost 100kg even due to said virus. Also a nice after effect.

An honourable mention to my, to date unmentioned nemesis, that has decided to intensify its efforts to derail my comfort. Piles. If you're a powerlifter in your 30s I'm gonna go out on a limb and say you know what I'm talking about. If you don't you aren't squatting enough or you're squatting high.

All this stuff has totally thrown off my prep for the comp but I think I'll do it unless life throws another curve-ball at me.

Interesting point about the running. Firstly I managed a 57min 10k 2 weeks ago which was pretty great - for me. That was like a 3 month goal I achieved in a month. Went for routine blood tests just to check on cholesterol etc. Firstly my cholesterol dropped a point vs 2 years prior. I was on a keto diet 2 years ago when the test was done. Seems to suggest the high fat diet is good for about a point on the cholesterol but that it reversed easily.

Also found my iron a bit low but not anaemic, red blood cells fine. That was a bit weird but I've subsequently found out that runners, particularly those that enter a new training cycle or ramp up intensity of training are at risk of iron depletion due to foot striking and sweating apparently. On both counts, due to being 100kg and pretty much throwing myself into long enough distances immediately I had a lot of broken blood vessels and a bit of brusing around my feet/ankles from the constant pounding of my well cultivated mass. Minimilast runners prob contributed too. I also sweat like a cornered virgin at the best of times, you can ring out my tops at the end of a run regardless of temperature outside. These factors apparently put your iron stores to the test.

Interesting if that is the cause given low iron could cause a lot of symptoms of "overtraining", none of which I have but it would be worth noting for any larger gentlemen who decide to start running. You could end up needlessly resting when you only need to be eating more steak and continuing to train.

Not bad advice for most issues really.

Eat more steak. Continue to train.