By Aussie standards it’s cold, probably around zero degrees Celsius. Not cold by North American standards or northern Europe.
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Anything under about 5 is cold in my books, while over 20 is hot.
I used to live in southern Spain and remember how skewed my idea of hot became after like six months. I was home in London for a week and it was super-hot for London, like 25C, and I was pretty chilly having been so used to the 35-40C I’d been walking around in.
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We have similar books
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Haha, I always have a chuckle watching the cricket and they’re saying “oh it’s a fairly hot day here at Lord’s” and it’s only 21*C, and the poms all have their shirts off
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Mate suns out guns out. Anything over 17 degrees is game on.
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17, haha, my wife has cracked the shits that the winter tank has been on for weeks 
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Ok, so while I felt fine to train after work I didn’t again. Because why? Because I wanted to enjoy feeling fine. I remembered how fucking heavy everything felt last week, so figured an extra day wouldn’t hurt at all.
Seems lazy as shit and it probably is but I don’t care. How fucked I felt Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday took me aback and I figured for whatever reason my body was doing something that was making me that tired so I backed off.
I’m back to normal as far as I can tell so tomorrow I’ll do that bodyweight horror. That’ll get the blood pumping again without actually loading much. Then I’ll do the other three days I should have done this week next week and that’ll leave me a week left of hypertrophy.
All this actually brought a few things to mind for me in that I started asking questions in my head.
For one, I’m not the first to find the hypertrophy phase tough. A couple of other guys on the team have ended up deloading during it too, but it isn’t exactly common.
So why? Not nutrition. I’ve been eating plenty, and the scale bears me out. Sleep? Maybe. Last week my sleep was fucked for a solid six or seven nights, until maybe Sunday night. So I’ll say that poor sleep was very probably a factor in all this. Except I’ve had shitter sleep before, for similar periods (remember night shifts? Shudders) and my training didn’t suffer as much. Doing a physical job? Because I haven’t combined shit sleep and a physical job before. Maybe, but I’ve been doing this for almost a year now and the last six weeks at work has been quiet, without anything strenuous. So I’m not really looking at that.
Could it be because I’m carrying more muscle than before? There’s more under the fat than I’ve had previously, and I’m pretty sure my LBM has gone up a fair bit. So more muscle means more demand on recovery and if you add shit sleep to that recovery is pretty much torpedoed.
That’s my theory anyway, because I can’t come up with anything else. Suggestions?
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You food has been good as you say but how has your hydration been. If you have been doing a physical job it may mean you need to drink a little more water. Are you waking up dry as fk, what’s your urine colour been like ?
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Could it just be a motivation issue? You’re kind of in this middle ground right now between a full blown hypertrophy block and getting back under those heavy weights to drive strength.
We all know that each phase is as important as the next, but if that style of training doesn’t click with you it can be hard to tell yourself, wifey and kiddo that you’re going to be absent for a couple hours to go do something that you dislike.
It gets hard for me to make it to the gym when you dislike your current program, especially when you’re not at least getting the satisfaction of hitting heavy weights (which is the case with my current program, ughhh).
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Sounds like you need to do some wave like training that mixes up the load and intensity each session. There’s a fancy name for it but I’m being lazy right now.
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Is it the high Intensity of the routine? Like Intensity as a feeling, not in terms of weight. It starts out tough, lots of short rests, or doing stuff in as few sets as possible, or pushing till failure. On pretty much all the sets. Then next week you have to come in and do it even faster/harder/more. Fast progression, always pushing hard hard is tough. I’m sure being bigger makes it tougher too.
As we’ve been talking about hypertrophy the last few weeks (months?) I’ve seen a few people(not total jokers) mention that high reps and especially sets to failure are just as neurologically taxing as heavier, near limit stuff.
You’ve mentioned dreading workouts, sleepy mentioned motivation. To me, those sound like signs of lots of CNS fatigue. Maybe you feel safe with the light weights, but you’re working harder than you think.
Kind of a tangent, and not something I’ve ever written out before, but if you look at programs that used to have “As Many Reps as Possible,” “As Few Sets as Possible,” Go as hard as possible don’t have that anymore. Westside for Skinny Bastards part 1 had multiple sets of bench press as many reps as possible, then DeFranco said controlling the reps worked a little better. 5/3/1 is about rep PRs, not rep maxes. I believe Greg had you guys doing something to failure, or maybe in as few sets as possible, with big barbell lifts, that you guys don’t do much anymore.
Hopefully that mess makes some kind of sense.
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Do you drink caffeine?
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This was my first thought…only thought really. More everything really which if you think about it the more you weigh just in general the more the rest of your every day activities will bog down recovery until your body adapts. Then add the increased LBM will take more time too.
I am guessing it is the other larger lifters who need to deload during the hyper phase as well? Or the newer and/or detrained athletes. 2 Month ago what I am doing now would have killed me. I am about 5-6kg lighter and less detrained now but similar situations I think.
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Woke at 258.2 lbs, still bloated.
Awesome response, thanks all.
@simo74 I’m pretty religious about hydration. I’ll go through four litres of water a day as a minimum. The only time my urine is dark is when I get up
@FlatsFarmer and @BOTSLAYER I think between you, you may have nailed it, as usual.
@lucasmon not a lot. I have a coffee with breakfast and occasionally one at work.
@littlesleeper the sessions are ok really. I think. Maybe not, I don’t know. I’m definitely looking forward to going back to regular training, so maybe there is something in that.
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In hindsight, I should have deloaded properly in week four (last week). The weights had no business feeling that heavy, and persisting throughout the week wasnt smart.
Stupid me.
Further to what @FlatsFarmer said about working harder than I realised, why didn’t I take more notice of how pumped my legs would get? That was something entirely new and bar noticing it I completely ignored it.
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Todays training
Tricep touchdowns and facepulls, some arm circles
Pushups
50 reps, 10 second rests - 18, 17, 15
Beat last week, one set less
Diamond pushups
25 reps, 10 second rests - 25 reps
Beat last week
Dips
50 reps, 10 second rests - 4x5, longer rest; 2x6, 5, longer rest; 13
Same number of sets as last week
Bench dips
50 reps, 10 second rests - 18, 17, 7, 8
Not quite, same number of sets as last week
Pullups
35 reps, still a big fat nope on the 10 second rests - 6 wide overhand, 3x6 wide neutral, 4 medium overhand, 4 wide neutral, 3 wide overhand
Air squats
80 reps, 10 second rests - 80 @mortdk and my inner quad started cramping at the end
Lying leg raises
50 reps, forgot the 10 second rests so they were just short rests - 2x20, 10
All up an hour and 40 minutes
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That’s more like it Mark, 80 reps of air squats is a lot of reps. Twice is silly 
I haven’t tried it, but maybe I should. At some point.
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Woke at 257.5 lbs, bloating might be going down some. Still feeling pretty decent.
Glad you pulled up uk. How long till you deload ?
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Two weeks? Ish?
@simo74 I’ll finish what I should have done this week next week, then I’ll have another week to do and then I’ll deload. Again.