Nutrition has been going as planned, apart from half a bag of chocolate covered raisins someone left on my desk today. Hasn’t hurt me much, had another cracking weigh in today (186.4), so happy with that. No training today because I can’t seem to fight this infection off. Been a few weeks since I had a full nights sleep, so that’s probably the culprit. Might try and sneak a half session in tomorrow if I feel up to some conditioning.
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Chest infection or whatever it is playing up a bit today, but i could still mostly breathe so time to work:
Nutrition for the week:
Breakfast: oats, as above
Lunch: 4 scoops total protein, 2 pieces of fruit
Dinners: either:
400g chilli, as above, with 100g rice
Chicken wraps, as above (400g Chicken, 2 tortillas, vegetation)
Or: chicken and sausage gnocchi: 200g gnocchi, 200g chicken, 2 lean pork sausages, vegetables.
Post workouts on training days: meat in bread.
Work for today:
Seated press: worked up to 45kg x 12
Then: 5 x 10 @ 25kg
Squats: worked up to 77.5kg x 10
Then: 5 x 10 @ 50kg
Pull ups: lots
Abs: some
Notes:
- This set up is really, really tedious. I can live with that though.
- Squats felt fine, not sure if I made a genuine mistake and forgot how many I was supposed to be doing, or just straight up pussied out. Either way, not the best way to progress.
- Don’t look now, but my seated press seems to be progressing well.
- pull ups getting very noticeably easier pretty quickly.
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The programs I’ve run that have made big impacts have been tedious, it might be the fact that to get better a something you have to do it a lot.
Meaning if you “just” want to be big, you can use a lot of different exercises aiming for the same muscles vs if you want to be stronger on a single lift you have to do the single lifts a lot.
If you worked up to the topset of the lift and then did 2 different movement for 3 x 10 like goblet squat and bulgarians as examples, it would be a little less boring
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And a lot more painful and miserable. 
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You’re probably both right. Once I finish this program (?), I’m extremely likely to switch to more traditional 5/3/1, rep PRs, single AMRAP FSL followed by a few bits of basic, volume assistance. But that’s best part of 5 months away yet, and I typically get distracted by new and shiny every cycle so a lot could change.
Do you have Forever and the Krypteia template?
Not yet, it’s on my list to get.
Work for today:
Bench: worked up to 75kg x 9
Then 5 x 10 @ 50kg
Deadlift: worked up to 102.5kg x 20
Pull ups: some
Notes:
- Bench PR set was majorly disappointing. Almost getting to “rethink” time here.
- Made up with it with the effort on deadlift. Lay on the floor for 5mins swearing after this. My teeth hurt, my neck hurts thought fuck it, let’s call that a day. Time for home and collapse in bed.
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Work for today:
Nope
Did my warm up sets of seated press, got to my PR set which was going fine, and just felt this pressure building in my head and felt like someone had poured hot tea down the back of my neck. Instant splitting headache that hasn’t gone away. Tried to do BBB sets, thinking they’d be light enough to not cause problems. Nope, just made it worse. Everytime I could deal any pressure building, splitting headache got worse. Shut it down and got out. Starting to get frustrated missing so many sessions now.
That doesn’t sound like a good thing.
Have any idea af of why you get the headache?
None at all. Came on last week during deadlifts, same feeling. Figured it was a one off because I was just pushing myself hard but then same thing today on seated press of all things. Feelings gone this morning.
Sounds like a pressure headache. Were you holding your breath at the time ?? I have had these before and they are not nice.
I was on the deadlifts last week, yeah. Hurt like a bastard, but I expected my first deadlift PR to hurt like fuck, so it didn’t worry me too much. Just stumbled home, popped a painkiller and got my head down.
Yesterday was very similar, maybe slightly worse feeling on seated presses, which are by far and away the easiest lift I do. And it continued to get worse, even on the ridiculously light BBB sets. Everytime the “warm tea down the back of the neck” feeling came back around rep 7, regardless of whether I was bothering to brace or not (I don’t need to brace on the BBB sets, although I normally do anyway to ingrain the habit). Does that sound like a pressure headache before? Never had them like this before.
Happy enough with the weigh in today. At least that’s moving in the right direction.
Slowly increasing volume on pull ups and started banded lateral raises outside of “gym hours” too. If i can genuinely only lift twice a week (when stupid things don’t go wrong), I’m really going to have to pile some volume into some extra curricula activities.
I think a sled should be on the cards for next summer.
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Pressure headache or what some call thunderclap headaches can be brought on by high blood pressure or hard physical activity and can be caused bleeding from an artery in the space surrounding the brain (I am not a doctor so if you are worried go and see one). They come on real strong and last shot 5 mins. I had this many years ago doing a max squat set. Felt ok after 5 mins but when I tried to do anything active it flared up again. I went to the Dr and he said it was most likely a small bleed, did some checks a scan and basically told me to rest for a couple of weeks. I have had it a couple of times since (in 20 years). Both times have been during deadlift and unusually managed to rest and was fine the next day. If you are at all worried or symptoms continue I would see your dr.
That sounds believable as the reason then, thank you for the detailed response. I’m not particularly worried about long term health (then again, I never worry about that), it just pisses me off missing lifting sessions.
It does pretty much fit with my plan of just slipping the session and starting again next week though.
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Soo… plan was to lift tonight, however I managed to get a splitting “pressure headache” again yesterday morning from doing some extremely sub maximal pull ups, so I think I need to take this a little more seriously as I can still feel the site where the pain comes from today.
My plan is to skip tonight so I can rest up until I can no longer feel it, hopefully only a few days, then start lifting with purely isolation stuff from then, slowly breaking out the fun stuff as I’m sure it’s not going to cause me any issues. Calories will be reduced by a few hundred calories a day, mostly from carbs during this time.
Does that sound like a plan that makes sense? @T3hPwnisher @MarkKO @simo74 ? I don’t want to be an idiot, but I’m sick of taking total lay offs every time something goes wrong, which seems to be every other week at the minute.
My solution is always Excedrin chased with a no carb Rockstar. I am probably not the best to discuss the matter.
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I deliberately chose you three as I figured I’d get 3 different points on the spectrum.
Thanks for the input though.
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Well in that case, yeah. Chemical solutions and just keep pushing through. Figure the body will learn to adapt when it finds out this is the ops tempo.
My insane theory is, if you always give the body rest when it starts acting up, it will start acting up when it wants rest. If you punish it when it starts acting up, it will stop doing it.
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