Nice work
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W5D7: Easy Jog (Road)
2 Miles in 16:19
Haven’t run in a while, so easing back into it with an easy little night jog.
Low back felt sort of banged up today, but it didn’t really affect this much. Should sort itself out soon enough.
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Has gotten substantially worse over the past few hours. Sciatic pain in my left glute and hamstring when raising my left leg out in front of me, pain + severely limited mobility extending my left leg while in a seated position, pain + severely limited mobility bending forwards or backwards, pain while sneezing.
Short of not having radicolopathy (sp?) symptoms in my left calf, and still being able to flex my left calf and glute, this is pretty much the exact same battery of symptoms as when I herniated a disk before starting my log, sans the initial back pain that I had with that injury.
Post 147 has a realllly long outline of the initial injury/surgery/recovery if you weren’t here back then and want some context.
I’m going to deload for a week, and probably just spend the next day or two doing a fuckton of walking and unloaded squatting/hinging. I would greatly prefer if I could keep the “spine surgery : decades of life” ratio under 1.
As an aside, how fucking stupid is it that of all things, what seems to have done this is single leg bodyweight back extensions? Like at least if I were to get hit by a car or fail a YOLO attempt at a five plate pull, I’d have a cool story.
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Deload D1
Walk ~4 Miles
BW Squats: Plenty
Feels better than 24 hours ago, getting back some mobility already, and walking is painless as of the evening. Good signs.
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Deload D2
Walk ~6 Miles
BW Squats & Hinges: Plenty
At this rate I’ll be back to 100% in the next couple days, but I’m still seeing out the week-long Deload either way. Might do some very light technique work or easy cardio in a couple days if this continues. Range of motion is pretty much all back, I can only trigger nerve pain by moving in a few very specific ways, and everything’s much less stiff.
I scored an uncurved 100% on my public administration exam. Pretty sure I did the same on my honors ethics exam, but we’ll see for sure in a couple days. Got told that my first draft for an English essay (The Roles of Perception, Reality, and the Individual in Naturalist & Modernist Literature) reads like a final draft, and is “already at the point of line-by-line revision.” I’m especially proud of that because said draft was written in a single energy-drink-fueled sitting.
Also got my topic certified for the first piece I’ll be writing for the Legal Research Club (a semi-local coal mining strike, and more broadly a brief history of labor laws in Alabama). I have a month to churn out a first draft and another month to finalize it, so there’s no pressure there yet. Also got my first paycheck from my tutoring job.
And I was one of ~30 applicants (from a pool of >200) to get selected for an interview to become an ambassador for the College of Arts and Sciences. Which would hook me up with another fat stipend, get me in touch with a bunch of big-name people connected to the school, and give me a very prestigious extracurricular to brag about on the off chance that I decide to aim higher than a guaranteed scholarship at a top-25 law school.
TL;DR: Life is good.
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Sorry to read about the circumstances, but nice squat! Looked like you had plenty left in there, it moved quick
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Thanks! I thought I had more in the tank too, but I tried and missed 365 a few minutes later. Should have it next time though, it was pretty close.
1 Like
Deload D3
Walk: 6 Miles
BW Squats, Hinges, Push-Ups
Probably going to do some low-impact conditioning tomorrow and Wednesday, a really easy upper and lower day on Tuesday and Thursday respectively, and get back to business on Friday. Found a potential summer job tutoring, where ideally I’d be making somewhere between 2-3X what I am now (the wages here are pretty abysmal because of the low minimum wage, but I have plenty of money already saved up so I’m just working to build my resume. My plan is basically to use the money earned during the school year as spending money, and save everything from the summers, when ~$25/hour becomes feasible).
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Deload D4
Run (Road) 1 Mile in 8:04
Walk ~1 miles
Run (Road) 1 Mile in 7:55
Walk ~1 Mile
Felt great, didn’t try to push the pace or distance at all. I was really worried a few days ago, so this whole thing is honestly a good learning my experience for expectations and what do do if my back flairs up again. Not that I wouldn’t much rather have just trained normally this week lol.
5 Likes
Deload D5: Light Upper
DE Press: 5x2@105
NG Chin: 5x6
Bench: Work to 225x1 (PR)
@creative_name ’s guide to PRing your bench
1: Stop benching
2: Wait 2 months
3: Reinjure spine
4: PR
The pieces lined up pretty well here, in that I’m not fatigued, and bench is something that won’t bother my back even taken heavy (for me). This is still disproportionately low compared to everything else, but at least the milestone’s knocked out now.
Edit: I copied the setup for this bench from some video I found on Instagram, and it’s legitimately the first time ever that I’ve felt solid benching, so I’m gonna mark it down so that I don’t forget it
- Sit on very end of bench, lay down backwards
- Grab bar and slide up the bench until your head’s off the far end
- In that position, bring your legs back towards you, and pinch the bench between them
- Slide back forwards until your eyes are immediately underneath the bar, and start flexing quads/trying to push through the floor.
- Depress/squeeze upper back, unrack, bench.
Those are embarrassingly simple cues to have given me as much trouble as they have lol. My arch is godawful, probably because any sort of flexibility I had in that position left when I got operated on, so what’s in the video is as much of an arch as I can muster. It’s funny, in that it feels like a much bigger arch than it is, then I go back and rewatch and I’m like at most 3" off the bench lol.
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Programming Updates:
In Retrospect: I wrote this at 3:30 AM off an energy drink, and there’s a solid chance it makes zero sense to anyone else. Enter at your own risk. Especially the paragraph about how I’m gonna program Zeno squats.
Coming back from this injury, i’m gonna be changing some stuff around with how I’m programming my lower body work. The intent here is to keep it difficult and productive, while cutting out the stuff that seems to consistently fuck with my low back. None of this is permanent, and in the long run I want to be at a point where I can actually do all of that stuff in the first place and don’t have to worry about cutting it. But for now, we do what we have to. To be more precise:
Deadlifting
- What Doesn’t Work For Now:
- Conventional pulling - Both because it leaves me hurting and because I suck at it
- RDL’s - has only taken me a few weeks of doing them relatively light to figure that one out
- Consistent AMRAP’s - Pushing them weekly on 5/3/1 left my back messed up to some extent pretty much constantly, and I’ve only really been able to appreciate that since taking a few weeks off of deadlifts
- What I’m Going to Do:
- Janae Kroc’s simple deadlifting program (with sumo pulls*), and a bunch of back extensions/prone ham curls to actually build the deadlifting musculature. This will replace one day of squatting.
- Why? - By design, this is a program with a pretty low volume of actual deadlifting. I want to keep building my deadlift without deadlifting very intensely/high-volume, so this seems like a perfect fit. Also, it has a 4-week deload structure, which matches the other stuff I have planned. And I get to potentially piss people off by not deadnaming Kroc lol.
Squatting
- What Doesn’t Work For Now:
- Beltless 20-Rep Sets - This is something I really want to come back to because I know how big the potential reward is, but I’m like 90% sure this is what messed me up bad enough that I had to take this week to heal up. I’ve tried with a loose belt, too, but it didn’t seem to help much.
- Lots of Straight Sets - Stuff like 5x10’s and 5x5’s seems to mess me up substantially more than strip sets/drop sets (what’s the difference, anyways?). No clue why it is, but the big drop set workout I did a couple weeks back surprised me in that it was both the most difficult squatting I had done in a while, and left my back feeling the least beat-up
- What I’m Going to Do:
- Zeno Squats a la Pwn!
- Why? - It’s a drop-set based workout that lets me get in some good volume, and heavy reps, without any of the stuff that seems to set off my back. And I get to use a belt through it.
- How Do I Actually Plan on Programming It? - I’m using 4 week cycles, so I’m thinking that the fourth week will be a deload, and 1-3 will be heavy, light, and medium weeks. I plan on doing the extra-awful version where you strip the weights all the way down to squatting the bar. This actually adds in an interesting regulatory factor, in that the heavier weeks will have less reps in the top set, which means that once the weight starts getting stripped it will actually be much easier than the lighter weeks, where the reps to match will still be pretty high. And just to throw another X-factor in there, I want to try squatting the heaviest sets in wraps on the first and third week. I’m guessing that the HLM starting numbers will be about 365/275/315 once I figure out how to squat in wraps efficiently, so I’ll stick with those for a while and build up the reps. Will probably increase them once I can hit 8’s in all three top sets in a cycle. This will replace the other squat workout.
In Summary:
- Deload week once every 4th week. Probably just some DE stuff, a few chins, and conditioning (the exception is my press, where I’ll still have my one testing set, but probably just won’t press at all the second day)
- Other than that, upper body programming is completely unchanged
- My first lower day of the week (Sunday) is now Zeno Squats, with HLM weights by week, as detailed above. RDL’s are cut from this day.
- My second lower day of the week (Wednesday) is now Kroc’s deadlifting program
- This Friday Will be dubbed “Three Programs Walk into a Bar…; W1D1”.
*This actually isn’t quite as blasphemous as it initially seems. The article’s introductory picture literally shows someone pulling sumo.
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Deload D6: Super Easy Run
2.5 Miles @ Slow
Nice and easy. I think I’m going to h it a few practice reps in wraps tomorrow to see how they feel, and then that’ll be it for the Deload.
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Deload D7: Squat
Wrapped Squats: Work to 345x1
I basically did my raw squat technique in wraps, and noticed not much of a difference other than that my knees turned all sorts of fun colors between sets lol. My back held up though, so that’s good. This wasn’t all all-out max, I just stopped once it wasn’t easy.
I’ll probably wait until I’m doing something else programming-wise to start doing much with these. Seems like a worse idea the more I think about it for now. Will probably start with 295/255/275 for the HLM squats in that case.
100% uncurved on my honors intro ethics exam from last week. The non-honors section of the class had the exact same exam and averaged a 52%, so I’m very happy with that (although if I’m being completely honest that’s more of an indictment of UA’s students than a sign that the test was hard, or that I did anything special).
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Three Programs Walk into a Bar W1D1: Press
Press: 1x3@150, 2x2@155, 3x1@160
DB Bench: 80x9/10/6
Dips: +55x10/8/7
Cross-Chest Press: 70x18/14/12
Pushdowns: 77.5x10/9/7
Good to be back.
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Three Programs Walk into a Bar W1D2: Chin
Chins: 5x5@+50
Power Shrug Drop Set: 7x405/15x315/32x226
OA Cable Rows: 3x10@165
Hammer Curls: 25x20/17/15/13/10
Solid day all around. Biceps got a really good pump and I couldn’t get my fingers to my shoulders for like half an hour lol. Tomorrow is going to be the first day different from what I was doing before, so that’s exciting.
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Power Shrug Drop Set: 7x405/15x315/32x226
I can see why your neck is so jacked 
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They’re honestly one of my favorite lifts to do. Super cheaty, heavy, loud, for high reps, and they leave you with a crazy trap pump. I worked up to like 500 back when I was running BtM a while back.
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Three Programs Walk into a Bar W1D3: Squat
Zeno Squats (15 Deep Breaths Between Chunks) 295x7 (PR)/4/2/1, 275x7
Leg Extensions: 170x20/20/16/15
Prone Ham Curls: 100x10//9/7/6
Squatted my heart out, and my back feels great. Ignoring the one-off and not-to-depth set of 315x7 from a while back, not only is the top set a PR, but following it up with 275x7 suggests that my ten rep PR at that weight is also ready to be broken in two weeks.
Somewhat baffled at the prone ham curls - I think I’m missing some setting on the machine, because it’s always a coin flip with these whether I’ll be able to move the same weight for ~10 or ~20 reps, and it’s not a recovery issue because nothing else changes. It’s not hugely important because the main goal with those accessories is just to do some reps, get close to failure, and spark some growth.
8 Likes
121/125 = 96.8% on my intro American government midterm. These are actually the first points I’ve lost all semester, after like eight weeks, and because I can practically guarantee that the average was godawful (we average like 25% attendance on a good day) I’ll probably get bumped back up to a 100.
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TPWiaB: W1D4: Easy Run
2.5 Miles @ Slow
Aaand my shins feel like shit again. I’m honestly considering just dropping running entirely for quite a while. There’s plenty of other conditioning I can do that doesn’t beat me up, and I don’t really care about being a good runner. It’s a shame, though, because I enjoy it.
7 Likes