I went into the gym with the intention of working up to a fairly easy triple on the floor press, and then doing a load of higher rep stuff for shoulders, triceps and biceps (yeah, I know). The floor press plan didn’t really work out at all: my CNS was shot, it was difficult to get into position because of my knee, and my shitty commercial gym lacks a power rack (which meant having to stack aerobic boxes to rack the bar on). I managed 110 for a hard double, did my pump stuff, and then went and walked lengths in the pool as a token rehab exercise.
*Unilateral exercises performed with left leg only.
I’ll have to train around my MCL injury for the next couple of months, which (for now) means that I am limited to performing my lower body exercises with my left leg only. The leg presses and romanian deadlifts were actually good fun, and I now have some major DOMS.
I’m still working around the knee injury. I’m on the road to recovery and am walking freely now. Since good mornings don’t require much knee extension, and this variant eliminates the problematic walkout, this is the perfect exercise for me right now. A 5kg PR was a bonus!
*My training partner had his finger on the trigger when it came to spotting this rep, and grabbed it a little early when the bar speed started to slow. I’m convinced that I had the rep, but it would have been a grinder.
My recovery is going very well, and I felt good enough to deadlift tonight. I worked up to 180kg - nothing spectacular, and not too tough, but I shut it down there. No reason to go crazy and put my rehab in jeopardy. The rest of the session was pretty boring, but I performed sets of squats with the bar in between sets of assistance exercises.
Rack pulls were fun. I’m not sure I’ve ever said that before! My best triple from this height is 190kg, so to get 180 plus some chains for three triples (with a recovering knee) was pretty satisfying.
Ab Pulldowns:
110lbx12
120lbx12
120lbx10
120lbx8
115lbx8
It felt good to be able to squat again, and it didn’t really trouble my knee to do so. I will be keeping it light and building up slowly, and will be spending a lot of time on max effort days in the future lifting without a belt or wraps to try to build my ‘core’ strength. The numbers are piss-poor right now, but hopefully I’ll be smashing PRs again in a couple of months!
