Friday, December 28 - Light squat/main deadlift day
Squat - transformer bar set to 1.5A
315x2x5 +vertical jump between sets - 1 min. rest
My right adductor was bugging me, I will get into that at the end of this. I did some PNF stretching and such and loosened it up, only issue is that it felt like I didn’t get as much of a bounce out of the hole. Probably better not to do stuff like that right before training if it can be avoided.
Deadlift
560x2 singles - This didn’t go as planned, I wanted at least a double and would have pulled it for 3 if it felt like it was there. I pulled it for one rep, which felt good and wasn’t a grind or anything, then got in position to pull a 2nd one but it just felt like nothing was there so I stopped. I wasn’t too happy with that so I figured if I can’t do a double I would at least do two singles, it moved about the same as the first one. I’m not going to bother posting a video because its nothing exciting, but I would say this looked like a conservative 2nd attempt. Probably could have pulled another 30lbs today, maybe more, but that’s not the objective at the moment.
Isometric/CAT dl
460x2x3 sets +isometrics on the floor, 3 minutes rest
Sumo SLDL
325x10x3 - my glutes were real sore from this, I sat down after the 2nd set but had to stand because my ass hurt too much. Hopefully that’s a good sign.
Barbell row
360x10, 7, 6
So the other day I came across something talking about adductor mobility and activation, it wasn’t anything incredible but one thing that I thought was a good idea was rolling your adductors with a ball on a bench. I have tried various things on my adductors and I find it’s hard to put enough pressure in the right places, and as I have mentioned my adductors are sometimes tight as hell after the first squat workout after a deload. Also, I have some issues with my left hip/leg.
Well, I tried rolling my adductors like that and the left side was incredibly tight and painful, it wasn’t bothering me before that but once I rolled it I was really feeling it. The right side wasn’t half as bad. So I tried doing the PNF stretching stuff that was recommended in the article, my adductors (and the left on in particular) felt better after but then yesterday my leg was aching again. Sometimes things like this get better before they get worse. So yesterday I did the ball on the bench thing again and opted to do PNF tactical frog stretches instead, I used to do those for a while but at some point my adductors were loose enough for my liking and pushing it further just made them feel sore.
Again, this last night and this morning the left side felt all messed up, just kind of achy and abnormal. So I rolled my adductors and did some stretching (not tactical frog, some less intense stuff) before training, it felt better but like I said it seemed to make me lose some of the stretch reflex at the bottom of the squat. From my experience, if I just keep doing this stuff regularly then after a couple weeks it should get better. I cant say whether my left adductor alone is responsible for most of my hip issues but it’s certainly part of it. When one muscle is tight and overactive it’s common for the antagonist muscle to tighten up as well. In recent times it’s my psoas (hip flexor), rectus femoris (hip flexor), and TFL (hip flexor/abductor) that have been giving me problems, all on the left side, and now I see that my left adductor (which is also one of the main hip extensors) is fucked, so this is starting to make sense.
Aside from that, I’m getting frustrated with my deadlift. I had some momentum for a while and was adding 10lbs to my 3rm each week, in retrospect I could have just continued with what I was doing until I pulled some heavy singles or go back to high rep stuff which seemed to pay off as that is what I was doing before I started setting PRs every week. Instead I did a bunch of heavy-ish singles with the intention of adding weight each week until I was pulling some real heavy singles, for multiple singles, but each week as I added weight it got proportionately harder so I figured I wasn’t getting any stronger as a result of what I was doing and abandoned that plan.
Now since the last mesocycle I decided to go back to the heavy top set/CAT volume work format, plus alternating isometrics one week and deficit DLs the next. It’s hard to say if it’s a result of the isometrics or the singles I did previously but the one good thing that came of all this is that I appear to have no form breakdown on heavy pulls. The problem is that I also don’t appear to have gotten any stronger, or at least not in any measurable way. I got the feeling that I would be better off just concentrating on puling from the floor and the isometrics for now so I’m going to stick with that for this block.
Part of the issue is that singles get you good at doing singles, not reps, so now that I’m pulling top sets for multiple reps (or at least trying to) I’m not ahead of where I was previously. The other thing is that the adaptations from isometrics are mostly specific to heavy singles as well, you don’t do a set of multiple isometric pulls but rather a series of them with several minutes and pulls with a moderate weight in between. In the end, PL is a sport that is about lifting the most you can for a single rep so that’s not necessarily a bad thing either and in the past I sucked at doing multiple heavy reps so maybe in two weeks I will just pull something heavy to get an idea of where I really am. Before my singles thing a couple months back I pulled 545x3 and 555x2 (which I matched a couple weeks ago and was mad I didn’t get 3) so I should have at least 600 as my 1rm and hopefully more by now.
The real question is what to do make consistent progress, and I’m not too sure what that is. Isometrics are definitely not something to do all the time. Spending a couple months doing high reps (including deficit DLs) and then switching to heavy triples and CAT singles really paid off but it doesn’t really fit with what I’m doing at the moment either. In the past I was doing multiple hard sets of 3-5 reps and making progress like that, that’s another option. I’m like a kid in a candy store, too many options and I don’t know what to pick.