By chance, was it the ROM that was causing pain? If so, might be a time to try out a shoulder saver bench style approach with like a pool noodle on the bar, or perhaps employ a slingshot. May be a way to work back into the bench.
It’s tough to say because this is a new pain point. I think I might have just mildly strained my front delt. It still hurts but I can move everything fine. It’s the same place I’d usually be sore in from benching, so it could just be lack of use and weakness coupled with over-eagerness to get to my planned top set of 235 today.
I’m going to keep the benching light and high-rep for now with more warm-up work. 10 reps with the empty bar may not be adequate anymore. As long as it feels good and I’m getting more work than I did before I’m not going to sweat it one bit.
My partner suggested the slingshot as well. He thinks I flared my elbow out but wasn’t paying that close of attention.
I’m sure I’ll figure something out.
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Thursday 3/25/21
I bitched out on lifting today because I prioritized buying a boat. I went with a 2016 Lund Impact 1675 with a 90 HP Merc, which isn’t very good for towing but perfect for any inland waterway in Maine and it is set up as a bow-to-stern fishing machine. It isn’t my ideal boat but wakeboarding/skiing/tubing was the distant second priority next to fishing and cruising. The kind of fish and ski boats I’m eyeing are ridiculously overpriced right now, with getting 10 grand over MSRP common. Not this year for me.
Comes with an 80lb thrust trolling motor, 7 inch lowrance fishfinder, life jackets, travel cover, upgraded seats, boarding ladder, and full vinyl flooring, which is great for durability. A huge 21 gallon gas tank to go all day on lakes like Moosehead and I’ll probably get a little 8 or 9.9 kicker motor too as soon as I see a cheap one. The seller is also throwing in a set of cannon downriggers and rod holders.
I’m guessing boats will be dirt cheap in a few years after all of this panic buying ends and people need money. I’ll upgrade to my ideal fish-and-ski setup whenever that happens. For now I’m psyched to explore Maine waterways and out-fish my kid. Who knows, maybe he’ll get this boat in a few years…
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Friday 3/26/21
Deadlift
135x5
205x5
275x3
325x3
375x3
405x3
405 moved really well for both of us. Lots left in the tank but we decided to cap it at a 100lb recent PR. At this rate of improvement we’ll be pulling 700 for reps sometime in April.
KB Strict press
10 reps with double 26’s
10 with double 35
10 with double 44
10 with double 53
Quick and easy workout tonight, lots of moving stuff in store for tomorrow.
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700 should be doable for you.
@biker We shall see about 700. Definitely possible, just not so sure about it being possible on my terms. Once I’m too strong for the weights I’ve got on order I may start thinking about setting new lifetime PR’s.
Instead of lifting today I picked up my boat!!!
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I think this always make sense. Actual pain is a sign something ain’t right and you’ve been lifting long enough to know the difference between damn this hurts because I’m working my muscles hard and damn this hurts because something ain’t right. I wish I had learned this earlier. I’ve battled tendinitis in my elbows for a long time and I used to push through it which made it way worse and cost me time having to shut down due to it. Now I’ve learned to take a lot of steps that have me back to virtually pain free. But the minute it flares now I shut it down.
This is awesome. I’m very fortunate my parents have a house on table rock lake in missouri (was my
grandparents who passed years ago). between now
and basically September we will be there as often as possible for taking the boat out. Probably only get 5-9 weekends there depending on work but always a great time.
Thursday 4/1/21
Life gave me a bit of an un-needed deload but I did move a tremendous amount of boxes, stuff and things up and down many flights of stairs over the last week, so I stayed active.
Home mat jiu jitsu is starting back up at my instructor’s place. We had about two hours of mat time today but kept things pretty easy and fun. The basement there is set up really, really nice with a LOT of mat space and even a fully matted corner to do wall and corner work. Super sweet home setup for sure.
Lifting is still the priority, and that resumes tomorrow.
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Some unexpected travel got in the way of those plans, but this will become a true statement again this week. My new deep-dish plates arrive tomorrow, and if nothing else I’ll get a lot of loaded carries done between the receiving dock at work and my basement.
Lots of DB and a little kettlebell work with what I’ve had access to, but nothing of note to log.
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Glad to see you lifting again!
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@ActivitiesGuy Thanks bro! As much as I love jiu jitsu and being a lazy man, barbells still have that special something that rolling and sitting in chairs does not.
My USA-made Rogue deep-dishes are now transported and unloaded into the basement, which along with the unboxing process, re-organization and photo-shoot of my old plates merits a mention in my log.
The Rogue Deep Dish plates are the nicest metal plates I’ve ever used, bar none. I’ve never used calibrated plates so I can’t speak to those, but these are superb. The fit and finish is perfect on all surfaces. Everything but the inside of the deep dish is machined and the inside is a very nice rough coating that, along with the deepness of the dish, gives you a great purchase on the plate. I haven’t bothered to weight these, but they are apparently within very tight tolerance of stated weight.
The nicest thing about them is the sound. They ring like bells, holding that tone for a LONG time. If you clamp them down they’re silent on squats at least, but I think they’ll ring a bit even if you’re clamped down hard on deads. I’m really curious to hear what they sound like with un-clamped deadlifts.
I left work early to have beverages with important business associates of distinction, but had to do at least a little squatting after I got home, even if mildly drunk.
135x5
185x5
225x5
275x3
315x1
Buncha KB swings.
So 315 felt a lot heavier than I remember it being, but I was also squatting 405 for reps last time that happened and I wasn’t six beers deep. Even so, 315 has always been the same amount of pressure on my back and it moved just fine today.
The space is shaping up nicely.
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Boom. Mmmm tipsy lifting… ftw.
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Speaking of being a lazy man…
I’ve not been lazy per-se, just busy and prioritizing various spring re-organization projects now that my roommate’s girlfriend has also moved in. She’d better not wreck the band like David’s wife did for Spinal Tap.
Just kidding, she’s great and getting the place in order like only a woman who gives a shit about stuff guys don’t can. Hence the busy week.
Plus I got that boat.
This is why I have home weights though. I just didn’t make it happen this week.
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Spinal Tap? Love it. Guess there are several in this group who’ll remember it.
Ypu’re active on the forum but what’s going lifting/life wise, man? Hitting the home gym?
We talked briefly about Means in the reading thread. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this speech, if you’re interested/have time:
(I just linked the first google search result, the particular “library” this is a part of doesn’t mean anything to me.)
(I didn’t want to start a new thread for this or clutter up anothet thread, but let me know if you want this taken out of your log.)
It’s funny you bumped my log because I was just reading through it earlier this week. I’m thinking I should start logging again, even though there’s not a ton to log right now. I lift in the basement occasionally but I’ve got a pair of 35 and 44 lb kettlebells at work that I just pick up and work with a few times throughout the day. As long as we don’t have vendor, customer or military visits nobody really cares if you’re a sweaty mess at work or use the hose out back to rinse off.
Now that I can lift without a mask I’m considering re-joining the old neighborhood gym and getting back into a lifting/sauna/hot tub routine after work on the weeknights. I’m just getting over the 'rona at the moment so maybe this weekend I’ll leave my top-of-the line Rogue equipment to go lift with the crappy bars and crappy plates at the place where I made the best progress.
That was an interesting speech by Russel Means, set in my birth year of 1980 when the Soviet Union was bad guy #1. He presents a lot of valid criticism concerning European ideas, correctly identifying Marxism as an intellectual outgrowth of earlier European ideas. I don’t agree with how he connects those dots, especially going from Marx to someone like Newton, but he’s right that those are all ideas that came about through preceding ideas, mostly from a bunch of other Europeans.
He also raises very valid concerns surrounding the impacts of heavy industry like mining and fossil fuel extraction, all of which were a major concern and continue to be a concern.
What he fails to do is actually put forward a competing vision that’s not capitalist or Marxist. He instead leaves us with the impression that there’s some third way that’s rooted in Lakota traditions of some kind. Perhaps there is, but he doesn’t really explain how such a system would differ from either capitalism or Marxism. He sounds a dread alarm about humanity-ending environmental collapse, and then goes on to cast this as some inevitable development which, on a long enough time scale, I suppose he will be proven correct. 40 years later, however, and we’re still trucking along fine.
It’s obvious he has an axe to grind with Europeans and you can’t really blame him for that. Like all things, however, it is good to ask yourself…
Compared to what?
You could make an argument that North American tribes are fortunate that it was European Christians who won the Battle for North America. A technologically superior foreign power was going to come along for the land sooner or later, bringing the same suite of diseases that any advanced civilization taking part in global trade routes would have.
If I were a N. American Plains Indian, I’d be glad it wasn’t the Aztec civilization who took off and had an expansionist foreign policy. Maybe there are kinder, gentler colonial powers who would have been conscientious stewards of both the land and traditional native values who would have been preferable to the colonial powers North Americans got stuck with, but I can’t name any such alternatives.
The diseases were coming no matter what. This is still a concern for the handful of uncontacted tribal people still living the same lifestyle they have for thousands of years. Much ink has been spilled debating the ethics of interacting with these people, who are probably the closest approximation to what Means describes, a society unburdened by European thought and culture.
Would you enjoy being an Andaman Islander today?
Means correctly points out that the tribal people of Asia have been treated downright ruthlessly by Chi-coms and the Soviets. Would you want to switch places with a Kazakh steppe nomad in the 1920’s? How about a Uyghur in China today?
I think his message of cultural preservation is important, and the concerns he raises about Lakota traditions dying off are very valid. That sort of thing happens very easily in America. My family is only two generations in and I’m about as Polish as you are.
In other words, I’m an American, which I don’t think is a bad thing to be at all. I wish I had learned more about Poland while my grandfather was still alive, but he died when I was 9 years old and I was far more concerned with beating Final Fantasy on my NES than learning about my Polish heritage.
A good book you may be interested in that explains how various societies ended up being far more technologically developed than others is Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. I think he’s probably released an updated version since the one I read 10 years ago or so.
Thanks for the good read and I’m always happy to share my thoughts here in my log.
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I haven’t forgotten this but I’m waiting till I have time to think so I can post a decent reply. Thanks for taking the time, always interested in hearing your thoughts. And it helps that you’re a pretty good writer.
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I’m eager to hear your thoughts and I hope you can find at least one thing to disagree with me on. Please accept my compliments on being wise enough to spend a little time forming ideas and polite enough to let me know you’re doing it.
I’ve been thinking about this speech since you shared it with me and I wanted to commit a thought to writing before it escapes me. I hope Russel Means can forgive me from beyond the grave, as he does have a good point about the infectious nature of writing, but oral tradition simply isn’t viable in this situation.
It really isn’t that big of a deal for me to become Americanized. This is actually exactly what my grandparents wanted, opting specifically to speak English at home and raise my mom and her siblings as Americans, not Poles. The Polish language died with my grandparents in my family, and we all chose to study languages that aren’t Polish for some reason. I studied the language of our oppressors, the Germans.
Poland is still there, and likely to be there for quite some time.
Lakota people, on the other hand, don’t have the same kind of foothold. This imparts more urgency to the message of Means, who I have to remind myself was speaking verbally to an audience of Lakota and Lakota sympathizers.
If the Lakota who are still alive forget or lose sight of what Lakota is, or if they allow their children to, the only Lakota left will be the Lakota who people chose to write about.
And much of that writing has been done by white people of European heritage. Perhaps in the future it will be done by European thinkers of Lakota heritage, who are Americans like me.
Glad you’re back in using this thread, now some tipsy lifting is rqd matey!
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I appreciate the encouragement to drink and lift. I got the double 53’s out this morning and did some swings, squats and presses on this rather crappy snow day, but without any beer. Or whiskey, for that matter.
The 'rona is still keeping me down a bit. So is this particular winter storm, which began with a layer of freezing rain, followed by a thick layer of sleet and then some really powdery snow and lots of wind. It’s basically the worst stuff to drive on or try to shovel.
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