I’m moved. Spent 7 days driving across the country, and then I’ve been in varying states of sick the next 7. I got a sore throat bad enough that I had to upgrade to hydrocodone for a day and a half, just so I didn’t overdose on Tylenol and Motrin. Still not sleeping through the night, but things are slowly improving.
Saw lots of beautiful country on the drive… to the point where I’m a little tired of rivers and mountains and trees and scenic views.
No training at all during this time. On the plus side, no shoulder pain at all anymore. No knee or hip pain either.
People around here do a lot of running. I still look enough like a runner that people just assume I do. I’ve been asked twice by two of my girlfriend’s friends already.
My gym is disassembled in a 10 x 20 storage unit with boxes and furniture. We’re still working through getting the stuff in the apartment integrated, especially difficult since we each had fully stocked kitchens. When I’m feeling better I’ll rearrange things and reassemble the gym. There’s not quite enough room to put it together right now.
Two of my barbells fell apart during the move. I’ve managed to get one of them working again, but I’ll probably file a claim against the moving company and get myself at least one good barbell out of it.
[quote]flipcollar wrote:
Where’d you move to?[/quote]
Portland, OR area. People are weird, but it’s nice up here so far. Also lots to see on the drive here – Badlands, Black Hills, Mt Rushmore, Devil’s Tower, Bighorn Forest, Yellowstone, Berkeley Pit (Butte, MT), Clearwater Forest, Columbia Gorge.
[quote]trivium wrote:
Are you still training?[/quote]
You know I answered that in the first post on this page… but, at the moment, no.
Strep throat, or something thereabout, put a serious damper on things once I got here; I don’t know for sure if it’s strep (the rapid test came back negative and it wasn’t sent for culture), but it’s responding to Augmentin and improving. For a couple days, even the slightest cough would bring me to the ground in pain and I could barely swallow.
In the storage unit, my weight plates are behind and under some stuff, my mats are under some other stuff, and my barbells are semi-broken. I don’t really have room to assemble my rack until I rearrange a bunch of stuff.
Sometime within the next week, I’ll at least have things in place to do deads/mat pulls. I might have to stick with those and clean/press for now. Not the worst situation to be in.
[quote]spar4tee wrote:
What a pain lol. Glad you made it there safe and without too much trouble though.[/quote]
Traveling these days is nothing like it used to be.
Online GPS (google maps), offline GPS (car), and realtime weather maps with doppler and satellite overlays make things quite a bit different. Much easier to make decisions like “ok, heavy rains and 40+ mph wind gusts… maybe I’ll stay in the foothills until this passes”. Or, “20 minutes to clear skies”.
The offline GPS was particularly useful on this trip. For example, there’s no cell coverage with AT&T in Yellowstone.
Plus I had cold weather gear, tools, extra gas, bedding, and maps. I was in pretty good shape. The bigger shock was realizing that I could genuinely just “disappear” and nobody would know. Hours of driving in some very sparsely populated areas, without cell coverage, and even GPS has some issues in mountain valleys.
I have a lot more respect and awe for the early explorers, since they were doing the same thing but through fairly hostile territory. I’m not sure I would have done it myself.
After about an hour crawling around and under and doing all sorts of weird weighted balancing acts trying to get things moved around, I finally have a very basic gym setup in the storage unit. I don’t have enough room for all my plates up front, so just 45s and a pair of 25s for now.
Because of the way the garage door rolls up in front, there’s not enough height for pressing with plates on the bar, but at least there’s room for mat pulls, cleans and SGHPs. May step outside to do pressing.
Did a couple reps pressing with just the bar, tweaked my left shoulder a bit on the first rep. CT’s cue of “armpits to the audience” seems to be the right shoulder positioning for pressing for me – at least with the bar. Obviously will be modified as necessary when weighted.
[quote]LoRez wrote:
I totally missed that conversation; that’s a lot of moving. If it weren’t for training, I’d have thought you were running from the law…
[/quote]
[quote]LoRez wrote:
I totally missed that conversation; that’s a lot of moving. If it weren’t for training, I’d have thought you were running from the law…
[/quote]
Powerlifting on the run.
That would be one hell of a story haha.[/quote]
lol
One template for doing deadlifts 3x a week is: heavy, grip, volume. Heavy is heavy. Grip is using something like an axle, just taxing the grip itself. Volume is pretty much what I did yesterday.
I also saw… deadlift and push press.
And then I ran across a basic template of my own that I suggested once upon a time. It was even AnytimeJake approved. A, rest, B, rest, repeat. A = dead and ohp; B = bench and row. I kind of like the idea once I have access to my bench and rack.
But what I’m thinking:
M: heavier deads, 3-5 range
W: axle zerchers (not zercher squats, but from the ground, to the knees, squat, then crook of the arm up)
F: lighter deads, 8-10 range
(not necessarily those days, just the rotation)
The axle zerchers might be a dumb idea based on where they’re placed, at least once they’re somewhat heavy. But for now, I’m pretty sure my grip will fatigue long before anything else so it won’t be an issue.
Shoulders feel fine right now. We’ll see tonight/tomorrow. The last couple reps at 85 were pushing it a bit so I dug around and found a pair of 5s.
Thumbless, no wraps and with a barbell, not an axle.
Just looked back, and it was at 90 lbs where I had my issues with my ribs. I did 5x5 with 85, then was doing that with 90 when my rib popped/that-tearing-sound. I think I’ll just slowly work up with 75 and 80 lbs for sets of 10 before getting back to 85. Probably the safest bet.
Shoulders don’t feel bad, so that’s good. There’s still a few positions I can put them in where I feel the impingement, but nothing different than normal.
Back and hamstrings are still sore from the mat pulls the other day. Interestingly they’re sore in a place where it’s actually uncomfortable if my posture is bad, so forcing me to keep better posture.
The mat pulls seemed to be just the right dose of lifting for what I needed. I don’t think the Z Presses were enough. Not sure if not enough volume or not enough weight. I still think soreness after a layoff is a good indicator of a decent workout.
I read through the book “Off The Floor - A Manual for Deadlift Domination”. He introduced a way of using biofeedback to determine weights and movements for the day. Kind of different.
More interesting is his “adaptifier” program, available at the website of the same name. From the screenshots in his book, he’s graphing intensity, total volume and density over time, and calculating some index off of it. Somehow he uses those values along with how you feel, to determine when you should increase intensity and when to increase volume and density.
I haven’t quite wrapped my head around it… but it basically seems to come down to tracking stuff and letting that determine what your workout will be for each day. Like predictive periodization or something.
