BtN Press/band pull apart superset
3x10x125/50 total reps
Breathing Squats/Pull overs
20x355/20x20lbs
Assistance Work Circuit: rows into shrugs into reverse hypers into GHRs
Gorilla rows
1x40x24kg bells
Axle shrugs against strong short bands
1x30
Reverse hyper
1x54x180
GHRs
1x30
POST WORKOUT SHAKE CONDITIONING/ASSISTANCE
10 min AMRAP of:
1 burpee chin
1 40kg KB swing
Add a swing per round. Got through 18 full rounds
50 dips
25 pushdowns
25 band curls
Notes:
Every workout from here on out is uncharted territory. Unlike last run, I donāt feel like Iām playing with fire with every workout. Not having RSV or a torn hamstring is pretty amazing that way. I held the bar the lowest itās ever been in my life, which is a byproduct of my garage being so cold that my hands were numb approaching the set and I had to effectively slap the bar on top of my back, so it slid quite a bit. I had no doubt in my bodyās ability to get through the set: just needed to make sure I could keep the bar on me.
Forearms are slightly less pissy, but still letting their feelings be heard. Pressing was still strong.
I like what I came up with for the assistance. Took a little longer to set up, but running a blitz through those movements is a bit closer in spirit to the deadlifts and blew me away. Also, I was able to get all my chins done unassisted. Thereās still pain in the area, but performance is improving.
Really like what I came up with for the conditioning. Swings donāt bug my forearms, and they work that hip hinge that is otherwise lacking, and I was absolutely hurting conditioning-wise in the later rounds. Burpee chins are always a great choice, but I know I can let myself meander on them, so I kept it to a single just to get in the level change and brutality it brings.
Appetite is through the roof. Iām leaning into it. Iāll do some sort of stupid conditioning later.
Some goofball updates Iāve been meaning to write, but I shared with the Mrs my 2x20 rep squat adventure, and since sheās also psychotic and has done her own run of Super Squats before she spent the whole weekend being in awe of me. But the best part too is I started off telling her the story saying āI realized I had done the same weight as last timeā and she finished it by saying āSo of course you loaded up 5lbs and did it all overā
The other big W was, in celebration of us staying here, we decided to go local and buy the local University sweatshirts. I got my standard XL. We get it home, the wife unfolds it and says āThis looks HUGE!ā I agreed: definitely oversizedā¦until I put it on and it fit snugly.
Just going to narrate this. I took 3 bells: 20kg, 40kg and 24kg. Iād do a burpee chin, then 5 swings with the 20, burpee chin, 2 with the 40, burpee chin, 3 with the 24. Thatās 1 round.
Got 20 rounds in exactly 22 minutes, so then I did a Tabata workout, where for the 20 seconds Iād swing one of the bells, then in the 10 seconds off Iād do 2 burpee chins.
After that, I got in 3 more rounds of the first protocol in the remaining 4 minutes to get in a full 30 minute workout.
This seemed like a āgood bad ideaā on paper but fell kinda flat. Just didnāt have much punch to it. The tabata in the middle helped breathe a little more life into me: if I were to do it again, I think Iād do more like Tabata-Non Tabata on a rotation. But I got in a good amount of swings and burpee chins.
Iāll never forget the time I passed out in LA Fitness after quite a few months taking Stacker 3 diet pills mixed with OG Monster Energy drinks and/or Bucked Up LFG pre-workout. I was probably going over 1,200 mg. of caffeine a day without even thinking about it.
I remember one day, after I switched to coffee, I was at a coffee shop and found out you could get free refills. By 10am, I had 3 large cold brews. 5pm BJJ practice comes around, have my first roll, and I tell my coach āI think Iām about to have a heart attackā. He responds āWhat youāve never had too much caffeine before?ā
That day I learned lots of caffeine and cardio do not mix. Also, I learned my coach is a caffeine junkie.
@round2lifting Hah! Amazing. I remember my first time getting on night shifts, I took to having a 5 hour energy immediately upon waking to chase away the grogginess, but one day I FORGOT I already had my 5 hour energy. I thankfully didnāt drink another one, but I DID slug a diet mountain dew immediately after the 5 hour energy, and an hour later I experience time SLOWING DOWN. It was surreal, haha.
PM WORKOUT (1600)
TABEARTA. Got 4 complexes per round for the first 5 rounds and fell off after that. Digging this challenge.
Would you mind ging a timeline of your training and number through the years? I sometimes get demotivated because things arenāt progressing as fast as I hoped.
@Panopticum Much appreciate dude! Man, thatāll be an undertaking for 23 years of training, haha. Iām not too good on numbers/milestones, but Iāll try to put something together. Gimme a minute on that.
Tweaked something in my upper right glute/lower back yesterday during the swings, which made unracking the bar uncomfortable and had me moving like the Tin man on the very first rep, but after that things seemed to click into place on the set. When I hit rep 10, I knew I had victory. For you readers at home, no joke, if you wanna take away some of the anxiety of Super Squats, do a run where you work up to 30 reps: it makes 20 feel so mundane. And itās so weird how I rack the weight, feel somewhat ok, and then promptly die as soon as the pull overs start. It reminds me of the Cro Cop/Bob Sapp fight where Cro Cop lands the punch, it hits Bob, Bob registers it, but as time goes on he just starts dying harder and harder
Hitting the first pause on the press, and itās in an awesome spot: full 5lbs heavier than last run, and right about the area where the clean could start limiting me. Gives me a chance to get stronger in all regards.
Deadlifting is still seeming like a bad idea. Tear is taking a long time to fully recover. But the good mornings are absolutely brutal. Really focusing on stretching the hamstring.
Burpees is the plan for later, and itās supposed to be sparring night for Tang Soo Do tonight, which is usually pretty decent cardio.
Totally unrelated but awesome: we made bison Italian sloppy joes last night. 1.5 cups of pasta sauce, 1 tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, 1 tablespoon of onion powder (my family wonāt eat onions, otherwise you would chop up 1 medium onion) and 1.25lbs of ground bison. I used low carb hamburger buns, Mrs used homemade sourdough. Find me something more anabolic.
Cro cop was just a different caliber we donāt see today. Between him, Wanderlei Silva, and emaleyenenko (spelling?) I miss older school MMA. Andre Arlovski was my favorite being a fellow heavyweight.
Alright, so starting from Genesis: I was a fat kid growing up, but it was the 90s, so I was ā90s fat kidā fat and not current āgelatinous cube fat kidā that is in the modern era. I related a lot to Bobby Hill.
When I turned 14, I āturned the ship aroundā and lost a little over 20lbs of the course of the summer. I went from 5ā9 and 176lbs to 5ā9 and hanging around 152-158lbs. This was also the age I started weight training, as I grew up with the myth that lifting weights prior to turning 13 would stunt your growth.
Despite being a fat kid, I was still active growing up. My parents insisted that my brother and I always be involved in SOME sport, which was awesome of them. So prior to this point I had played t-ball, soccer, swam (ācompetitivelyā, in the sense I at least tried to race against others in meets), ice hockey, American football, and had started training Tae Kwon Do at age 8. I would go on to join the wrestling team in the fall and do that for 3 years, which was AMAZING for my physical shape.
The only real issue was that, since it was a weight class based sport, it meant I stayed at 152-158lbs for the next 3 years. Which, given I was a fat kid, Iām sure I woulda been too afraid to eat to gain anyway, but still. Here I am at my 17th Birthday at around 155lbs.
I genuinely donāt remember many of my starting numbers. I know I started with the bar on bench at 14, and I didnāt squat or deadlift until I got to college. Most lower body work was athletics and some leg pressing/curls/extensions. My high school coach taught me that squats and deadlifts were dangerousā¦yay. But I still lived training, and was always doing physical stuff. Really, martial arts were my passion and lifting was a thing I did to get better at it.
The weekend that wrestling ended, I put on 10lbs and it never went away. It was a bingefest of cookies, sweets, junkfood, etc. All the things I had been denying myself for those 3 years to make weight.
When I got to college at age 17 (I turned 18 that Oct), I had access to a much bigger weightroom AND a dinning hall that was buffet style, so I put on another 10lbs rapidly. I went for a bench max before turning 18 and managed 275. To this day, 275lbs is STILL significant to me whenever I bench it, because it was my first ever max.
The summer after my freshman year, I came home to my crappy standard bench and my dad challenged me to be able to bench 300lbs before the summer was over. So I did just that, on a standard bench rated to hold 300lbs INCLUDING the lifter, haha. So I had a 300lb bench at 18/almost 19 at a height of 5ā9 and the mid 180s with around 5 years of training.
I also still had no squat or deadlift. I eventually decided I wanted to ābe a powerlifterā because we only knew powerlifter and bodybuilding back then and of COURSE powerlifting made you strong for martial arts, so I stumbled into āWestside Barbell for Skinny Bastardsā off of t-nation (version 1)
And just as an aside, the first time I saw the photo of Joe Defranco I thought āHoly f**k I wanna be THAT!ā
I, of course, butchered the program, but while running that I was given a copy of āBeyond Bodybuildingā by Pavel Tsastouline, and would alternate between a few months of WS4SB and a few months of Pavelās 3-5, using periodization completely unbeknownst to me. Somewhere in the middle of all that I did my first run of Super Squats, achieving a 20x310 Denver squat (mile high) and hitting a 325lb bench at a bodyweight of 202lbs, first time I was ever over 200lbs.
Before graduating college, I hit my first ever 405 deadlift and had like a 365 squat.
Upon graduation, I hung up my gloves (was training MMA all through college) and bought full into lifting. It was 2007/2008 at that point, so I completely drank the Dave Tate Elitefts Koolaid and was eating everything in my path to get as big and strong as possible. I topped out at 217lbs, with a 365lb touch and go bench that I have NEVER replicated, a 540lb belteless terrible form deadlift and a 420 squat
I was 22 at that point, so 8 years of training.
Started a new job, moved to a new place, blew out my back in a new gym, couldnāt deadlift for 3 years, dealt with a lot of ennui, contemplated quitting lifting, then a powerlifting meet showed up in my area and I gave it āone last shotā, and at age 25/26 posted a 474-342 (highiest ever in competition)-525 showing at 198lbs
Did 2 more meets, got skinnier, competed in my final powerlifting meet at the age of 27 as a 181 and got a 502 squat that had eluded me FOREVER, a 336 bench and a 601 deadlift: first ever 600lb pull in comp
Moved again, more stuff happened, new gyms, new lives, started competing in strongman, found a new passion in that, and accomplished probably the greatest feat of deadlifting in my life with this set of 7x585+chains at a bodyweight of 195lbs at the age of 29, so 15 years of training.
I went on to rupture my hamstring, tear my ACL and fracture my patella in a strongman competition later that year.
And funny enough (a weird sort of funny), Iāve documented that entire journey since here on t-nation
@freshyfresh Because of my background/first love of martial arts, conditioning was always important to me. During that period of time that I hung up the gloves and went through my powerlifting meets, conditioning was on the backburner but still factored into my training. But when I started getting into strongman in 2013, I realized it was a hole in my game AND it was an easy one for me to address. I didnāt have access to all the implements, so I couldnāt get better really easy, but I COULD get my conditioning up, and back then strongman was still feeling that mid 2000s vibe, with a lot of medleys and carries vs the current era of āstupidly heavy for singlesā stuff, so it put me in a good way to focus on it.
But I didnāt start really āowningā conditioning until about 2020, when I had a health scare with my LDL and had to once again āturn the ship aroundā. Changed priorities, stopped chasing max strength, dropped a bunch of bodyweight and decided to ālean into itā. Since I knew my maxes were going to start dropping with the bodyweight, I chased a new dragon of conditioning because it was something I could watch myself really excel in as the weight dropped.
I had solid conditioning before that. I āpioneeredā doing 5/3/1 Building the Monolith in under an hour, haha. But I went a whole other level with 2020.
