Last time brushing my teeth hurt my back it was a tight Q.L. This guy says it can tighten up in your sleep.
Yeah, it’s not the QL at all, my back felt fine this morning. It’s all glutes. The funny thing, I just went out to do some shopping and was walking around, my glutes feel noticeably better but my left hip flexor now feels tight, like the two are in some kind of tug of war.
If I had laid on my back with my feet up for 5 minutes on Tuesday then I’m quite sure none of this would be an issue, I felt fine until around 3-4pm. I also bought some potassium and magnesium, maybe those will do something.
I drank a bit of rum and I feel 90% better. Maybe I’m deficient in hard liquor.
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This is called electrolyte cycling, very advanced diet technique 
Yes, thats the stuff!!
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How exactly would you supplement with that? In food? In a drink?
I bought potassium and magnesium tablets (2 separate things) but now I looked at the recommended daily intake for potassium and it’s 4700mg and the tablets are only 195mg. Did I get robbed or what? Those are the “maximum strength” ones too, everything else I saw was way less.
To get that recommended dose you need 15g or 15mL which I think is 3 tablespoons and it is a lot more than it sounds.
Your needs will depend on your diet and how much you sweat. I chronically sweat because it is like 40+ degrees here 23/7 so I go for a minimum of 15mL.
I have a system.
For Rice before I cook it (i cook my daily rice needs at once in the morning):
200g 7.5mL
300g 10mL
400g 12.5mL
500g 15mL
Any more than that and it will taste really salty for me personally. I think my threshold might be higher than the average for using it for so long. If I cook my potatoes with my rice I can get away with another 2.5mL (potatoes will absorb a lot of that salt taste).
I also put 2.5mL in every protein shake or prewokout I consume. This definitely over powers the protein shake but preworkout is a lot a sweeter and actually tastes better.
If I workout a 2nd time I will put 2.5mL in 1 liter of water. If I just need more of it in a day I will put 2.5mL in a liter of water. It tastes like salty water but it gets it done. I also salt (lite) any food I eat that doesnt contain rice.
Depends on price per mg but tabs would be way easier to take than the above system. I dont think you will need to go as crazy as I do with it though. You might be able to get away with just salting all of your food to taste with it.
That sounds kind of messed up to be honest, I don’t think I could manage that. When I’m at work I sweat like crazy in the summer though, I cook for a living and the kitchen itself is hotter than outside plus in front of the stove with both the ovens on must be well over 40c.
So if you slack on potassium you get crazy cramps or what? I never really had an issue with anything of that sort, although it could be a contributing factor. All I know is that spending the whole afternoon/evening on your feet after a hard lower body workout can cause things to cramp up, but I never considered that diet/nutrients had anything to do with it.
I paid attention to Stan Efferding for a little while when he came out with this vertical diet, he makes sure to get enough potassium but from actual food. I think the main thing was spinach, I looked it up yesterday and a cup of raw spinach (which is not a very accurate measurement for raw leaves, but whatever) has about a quarter of the recommended daily intake. I also bought some spinach yesterday, ate some last night and just now with my dinner, I think I could handle that better than lite salt in everything.
In any case, I’m not 100% better but it has improved over yesterday. Walking and moving around seems to make it feel better, for some reason the worst thing is getting up after laying down or sleeping. Squatting and trying to deadlift yesterday probably made it worse, but it was worth a try. I should be back to normal in a day or two, just need to avoid this happening again because not only am I wasting days I could be training but it sucks overall.
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It is
And yea I get cramps if I dont get the potassium. One time my mother in law put salt in my salt-lite bottles that were out (she saves everything) I was cramping really bad and couldnt figure it out right away. Was pretty annoyed and threw them all away and bought her new salt shakes etc.
This is the important part!
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Where do you live anyway? I remember you saying something about being in Mexico.
The way it’s going I think I will be back to normal in a day or two. The left side was a bit achy when I got up today but not too bad and rolling it with a lacrosse ball actually worked like it’ supposed to. I think maybe it was just too cramped up before for that to even have an effect.
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SI MEXICO!!! Torreon, Mexico.
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Just wondering, what do you do for a living there? For a while I was trying to figure out how to move somewhere nice and warm (here winter is like 7-8 months of the year) but it seems like it’s hard to make a decent living in most places unless you run a business
Happy Canada Day!
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Online poker and sports betting. I have expat friends who sell phones (in mass by email etc) or stock brokering stuff. I have a lot of Canadian friends who work construction and oil rig type stuff to take 1-3 months off a year and go to Mazatlan. Or one couple owned a small bar (but they actually moved back to Canada a couple years ago).
If any of those appeal to you
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I have a wife and two kids so I’m kind of stuck for now, but who knows what can happen in the future.
Monday, July 1 - Main bench day
My glute/hip feels almost normal and I’m can’t help myself sometimes so I thought I would train like normal, but it wasn’t going my way so I switched to deload mode. And yes it’s Canada day, but I’m working this afternoon so I can’t justify not training this morning.
Wider grip bench
350x3 - paused - went for a 4th and couldn’t lock it out. Looking at the video the 3rd rep was a bit slow in the top half although I didn’t notice it. This is where I decided to deload after all, 2 weeks ago it was 340x5, last week 345x4 which was ok, but if I can’t at least manage 4 reps here then I don’t see the point of pushing it for another week because chances are my squats and deadlifts wont be up to par.
275x3x3 t&g - 2 min. rest
Dips
bwx5x2 sets
Incline DB flys
50’s x6x2
Band pushdown
light band x7x2
Neutral grip chin-ups
bw x7x2
The mesocycle before this one went great, in this one only the first week was really good. Although bench was good up to last week. I only got one good deadlift session in where I pulled 485x6 from a deficit, which probably beats any set of 6 I ever pulled from the floor, so that’s positive. I’m mad at myself for not going for a 4th rep on SSB squats last week, but when I think about it I sound like Ronnie Coleman after he broke his back so maybe I should just stay quiet. Oh well, deload and keep moving forward.
I think maybe I beat up my glutes a bit too much, those snatch grip rack pulls really hit my glutes hard and combined with the sumo RDLs with a band (on top of all the other stuff) it might have been a bit too much, I never had anything like this happen before. I should probably work on my glutes with a lacrosse ball more often in the future, not just when something hurts.
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I found a “nice” 10 acres farmette in Costa Rica. BF said NO. It was just 250 000 cad.
I hate winter. Today is just perfect. I am just over the Québec side of the boarder near Mtl
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Just wait until your kids are off to college, then move to Flordia- WAYYY less taxes. That’s what my parents and their friends are doing. SoCal is also nice, but living costs are too high IMO
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Tuesday, July 2 - Main squat day - deload
SSB squat
405x2
315x3x2 sets
I’m dropping Hatfield squats, going forward it’s going to be a heavy top set and then CAT squats. Hatfield squats are alright but they take a lot of energy and I don’t feel like there is a whole lot of carryover to any sort of regular squat just because there is no real technical aspect, you just push as hard as you an with everything you have and that’s it. However, the do seem to be good for hypertrophy, my quads look bigger from the last couple months, so that’s positive.
SSB pause squat
315x2x2 - I already had 315 on the bar and it felt light so I just stuck with it, next week I will do these with the same weight but all the work before will be heavier and a bit more volume plus I will do more reps on these. And if I don’t even have 3 plates on the bar I’m not sure if it counts as a squat anyway.
Split stance RDL
135x6x2 sets - I figure it’s a good idea to do some unilateral work seeing as my hip was fucking around for the last week. These are more hip-focused than Bulgarian split squats, and I can’t stand those anymore in any case.
As for my hip/glute thing, I’m almost back to normal. My glute feels fine but it seems like my hip flexors are a little tight, but they have been worse so I’m not going to cry about it. I just can’t believe this went on for so long, it was getting frustrating. Anyway, I don’t mind taking a deload this week, next week I will have to make up for this bullshit.
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It sounds like foreigners/tourists get targeted for robberies and extortion a lot over there, including by the police. My cousin’s husband got robbed by the cops over there and another guy was telling me they pulled him over, took him to a bank machine, made him takeout something like $500 to give them. There was something in the news about this recently too. At one time I wanted to take a trip there because I heard it’s nice, but if you’re going to get robbed by cops then it doesn’t sound too great.
For anyone who cares, here’s an update on my aches and pains:
So after training yesterday if seemed like my hip flexors were tight, mostly on the left side, but other than that I was pretty much back to normal. In the afternoon I went to the park with my kids and while they were playing I stretched my hip flexors and got the to loosen up, but now I had a pain on the front my left thigh that wasn’t there before.
Later at home I rolled it with a lacrosse ball and tried various things, it was like the pain would migrate from one spot to the next. I’m not even sure what muscle it was that was bothering me, but at some point that calmed down and instead something in my adductors hurt. I tried to fix that but nothing worked, eventually I went to bed and in the morning it still hurt. I used this theracane thing to dig into it and finally the pain went away, I did my usual mobility stuff and it feels like nothing ever happened. I can only hope it stay this way, and there is no guarantee.
This whole episode seems very strange to me, it’s like there was some tension built up in my left leg/hip and it had to go somewhere, if one thing loosened up then something else would tighten up. It caused a lot of pain and frustration plus cost me a deadlift workout, but it looks like it’s over.