Oh yeah, plenty of people around. I see hundreds of people on a daily basis if I want small talk. It’s the closer friendships that are more difficult to foster at the minute, but I guess that’s true of everyone. Pretty first world problem.
I’m in no danger there. None at all. This has actually been one of the few times in a years I’ve actually felt a real level of satisfaction from my job. I was starting to plot my escape, and I’m fairly glad I haven’t yet.
Plenty of weights. I have the remnants of a home gym, with more than enough stuff to achieve my goals with a bit of thought. The only issue with it is that it’s a garage gym in a heavily residential area. My normal lifting times are late at night when it’s dark and local residents are likely to complain if I start crashing weights around. Last nights session I had to do by phone light. I’m considering moving some of the weights inside and try and develop a habit of doing some basics every night. If I was doing some pushes, pulls and squats daily, even at low intensity, that’s a lot of “work” done in a week with very little time.
Sorry, it wasn’t personal. I have a hard time investing in digital connections. Out of sight/out of mind. Hard enough to stay in touch with best mates currently out of country.
Apparently there are two types of parents: 1) the ones who prioritize their social lives and 2) the ones who prioritize their children.
The first group are the people you see all over the internet hanging out with other parents and dragging their kids around. They take their toddlers to adult parties and keep them up til midnight.
The second group is where my wife and I fall. They put their kids’ routines and interests first. We used to get invited to those gatherings and my wife always refused. Our kids go to bed early (8 now, but it used to be 7 pm). She felt it was unfair to them to take them somewhere and keep them up til 10 pm.
I’m sure there’s a balance to be had. The kids do enjoy being with other kids and staying up late. On the other hand, keeping them up late turns them into jerks the next day or two.
You also find that it’s just easier to stay home with small children. You have to haul around so much stuff before they’re potty trained. Snacks, diapers, wipes, changes of clothes, toys, etc. It’s just not worth the effort sometimes. It’s a lot cooler now that mine are both potty trained. We just load up and go.
I couldn’t agree more with this post. Me and the missus are definitely in the second camp, her more than me. Before this situation came up though, I was definitely trying to blend in a little bit of the first group. My thinking being that our kids look tonus as examples on how to live so if all they see us do is working and parenting, that’s all they’ll learn how to do. I would like them to learn how to be real people with interests and lives as well as parents and employees, and maybe pick up a little bit of hownto balance these things. That’s my little project once this thing blows over anyway.
I’m not a parent, so bear with me, as I regale what was customary for my parents (with the children that preceeded me). This was pre-instagram//social media. They’d hang out with other parents, and if any of the children became nappy they were just allowed to sleep in a bed somewhere (not kept up).
That doesn’t work with our kids. There’s too much excitement so they won’t relax. It works with infants because they don’t care, but once they hit the toddler stage then they just go and go and go until they’re forced to stop. They can even get so tired that they can’t fall asleep. That’s the worst. It’s like trying to hold and cuddle a bag of pissed off snakes.
Design an OK split around two intense vertical pulling and bicep stimulations (climbing)
Bench is worst lift, trying to have that catch up
Actually, bent-over row is even worse but I didn’t design this around having that surpass benching.
And not really a design constraint but trying out some OT/FT/DC-style training (flavor).
The only thing that strikes me as potentially “bad” with this design is the potential for residual lat fatigue from the bench on Friday but I could just swap the respective A&B-pairs between Monday and Friday.
How much better is my vertical pulling than everything else? Well, I’ve done chins with more than half of my bodyweight. As far as reps, I’ve never gone for a max-rep set as a stand-alone “test” but I’ve done 20 on a hangboard after climbing for 2 hours before then. Compared to everything else, that is quite out of whack.
I consider this the “introductory” phase. I then have an idea to slot in an extra exercise on wednesday and bump a few rep-ranges for an accumulation, and then progress further by adding drop-sets (accumulation) → rest-pause (intensification) → double rest pause (shock) but we’ll see if that plays out at all.
Overall mish-mash of KingBeef, Yates and Thibs.
Exercise
Monday
Set 1
Set 2
Set 3
Set 4
Notes
A
Military Press
12 (easy)
10 (moderate)
8-10 (hard)
Not to failure
B
Floor Press
10 (easy)
8 (moderate)
8-10 (hard)
Not to failure
C
Seated DB Lateral Raise
8-12
8-12 (F)
8-12 (F)
D
Incline Bench Rear Delt Raises
12-15
12-15 (F)
12-15 (F)
E
Old-timey DB Shrugs
8-10
8-10
8-10 (F)
8-10 (F)
F
Standing Calf-raise
10-12
DC-style. * Explode to the top, perform a 5-second negative, and then stretch at the bottom for 15 seconds on every rep.
Old-timey shrugs (shrugs+upright-row)
Tuesday: Climbing (stamina usually, power ocassionally)
Monday looks good. That’s a short session and it has quite little volume, so if it feels like you could handle more work, this is one of the places you could add into. If triceps are a weakness of yours, you could add a movement here.
Wednesday has a lot of work packed into it. Also, the exercise order seems a bit odd. (mainly doing RDL to failure before squatting) how would you feel about any one of these:
1 Abs-leg curl-squat-rdl-hack/leg press
2 Abs-leg curl-leg press-squat-RDL-Hack
3 Abs-leg curl-hack-squat-rdl-leg press
Option 1 would give you less total work as you’d only do Hack or leg press. It would also make squats a higher priority with you having less fatigue going into it. If you don’t feel comfortable about that with your current hip situation, it’s fine. If there were no restraints in place, this would be my go-to.
Option 2 just moves the RDL to a later point in the workout, and thus gives you less lower back fatigue going into squats, while still giving you the quad fatigue from doing leg press beforehand. That way you can get away with using a little less weight on squats, which, although probably not optimal for strength developement, can be a good idea all things considered.
Option 3 is my other favourite. You’ll do Hack squat before back squatting, which actually feels great. It’s not exactly the most spesific movement for squatting, but spesific enough to get you going and make your warmups for squats a tad shorter. In this model you’ll also be ending with leg press, which is great because you don’t need to worry about anything but giving it your all with that movement.
Friday looks good on paper. Again, a little low on the volume side, but you are pressing twice a week. Depending on what you want the most you could either make that a low incline (for more bench work) or high incline (for overhead press). You could also start at around 45 degrees and move either way in your next block of training, and make it a OHP/flat bench variation in the last one.
On saturday, again if there were no constraints I’d move the deadlift to be done a bit earlier. As of now you could think about if you moved the rear delt work to be done in the end, and had deadlift just a bit earlier,so you can go straight from rows to deads. If you put the rear delts at that spot to give your back a break, ignore this.
As a training week:
Pressing volume is on the low end of the spectrum. Not neccessafily a bad thing, just an observation. You’re pressing twice a week, which is good, and you can move to more spesific variations as you progress from block to block.
You are doing quite a lot of lower body work on a single day (and a bit comes from deadlift later in the week). I do see why you’d want to do this, but once the hip problem is solved you could think of splitting some of that up. Say, doing leg press at the end of one of your pressing days or what ever it may be. That’s just to being down the fatigue from one huge training day and to get higher quality sets done. Adding a second squat variatiom some where in the week could also be in the cards for you in the future. Also, if your hip feels worse after your leg days, consider dropping the volume a bit.
Because you’re climbing, I’m not worried about your back volume. You do have a deadlift on two days of the week, which is a good thing as well.
So all in all, stuff you could think about: (not neccessarily now, but in the future)
Pressing volume and where you want to go with the incline
Lower body volume and how you want to split it up
Exercise order once you’re more comfortable with your hip and your back
If you want to clarify anything or feel like I didn’t consider something, feel free to correct me. After all, it is your program.
Sure. My PT does not really know what is up. I’ve presented at his office a few times now needing manual adjustment to bring all my vertabrae in line. My best guess as to what happened initially was that I was experimenting with some bracing and ended up too much in a crunched position while under load, however I didn’t experience a trauma.
It’ll mostly make itself known in day-to-day life, if I’m not conciouos of bracing my abs before leaning over. A particular, recurring, case is in the dead of night where I’ll get up to visit the rest room, bend over to pick up the toilet seat and have to immediately place my hands on my knees because my torso is collapsing with a sharp pain being elicited just by the disc that’s next to the lowest ribs. I’m literally “catching” myself
As long as I’m mindful of it, I tend to be “safe” in the gym. So, if I do say any flat DB pressing I have to drop the DBs on the floor, I cannot “roll-up” without risking a remission.
I don’t know. My experience with this type of training isn’t great. I’m thinking that if what we have on paper right now is done 3 weeks, I can do the next step(s) for 3 weeks each but ultimately my body — not my plans — will dictate when a break is needed. I get that DC and FT need to cruise but they run RP/similar for several weeks. This is a more of a spread out blast.
What do you think about moving A&B from Monday and swapping that with A&B on Friday making the total shoulder frequency (front/side) a bit higher in the week? And maybe one extra triceps exercise on Monday as well, perhaps single-arm?
I love this. I’m doing that.
It’d be a low incline, even if I move the A&B exercises as per above. Bench is really far behind all my other main lifts.
You nailed it, and also I love deadlifting. Keeping it last will keep me “hungry” throughout the session.
but I do not disagree with you and if so moving the leg press to the tail end of Monday is a great idea! Bonus: then I can do calf raises in the leg press machine.
Maybe the volume is high, but you have to keep in mind you and I are not comparable in strength. As such, it’s not too unlikely I could recover. Did you consider that?
Physiologically, it would be advantageous to move the leg press though, thus hitting quads twice per week. Given my long femurs, that is probably a good idea. And, since I was considering the following
Thanks man! This is what I like to do, so I’m glad you asked
Can’t blame him, sounds like an odd case. I’m not going to try and diagnose over the internet, but keep in mind that you can experience pain without having tissue damage/with damage that is far less than you’d think it is, so don’t catasthropize it too much. (Note that I’m not trying to say your pain can’t be limiting and that we shouldn’t consider it. Just keep in mind that most likely everything is going to be fine)
That’s a smart approach. If everything feels good you can try to make those blocks a bit longer after the Intro block, but that’s up to you and how much changes between blocks.
Depending on how much you care about OHP, you could even do Bench and OHP in one session and Floor press and smith incline in the other. Which way around depends on wether you feel that the rest day before Monday is a good enough reason to have nearly all delt work in one day. If it isn’t, I’d have the Floor press and incline there.
I don’t see a problem with throwing a tricep movement on Monday
Great!
That sounds like a good plan
Well that’s a bonus! And it does sound good, makes the dedicated leg session a bit easier as well.
I did, but it does raise the question of how much volume do you need in order to progress, and where can you go if you start really high? (+ how much of that volume is productive when fatigue sets in) moving the leg press to Monday feels like a good solutionto the issue
That looks much more manageable. As for quads not being behind, I’d think of this more from the perspective of how a massive session can affect the rest of your week: if you throw a boatload of fatigue into your system just before the day you’re training your weakest lift, it could suffer.
Yeah, I’d leave a rep in the tank with RDL
In my opinion
Bench + MP
Floor press + smith incline
Would probably be the best option, because that way you get to split your bench volume up in a rather balanced fashion. Given that you don’t care as much about MP as you do about bench. Otherwise I’d either go with the original or what you suggested. In General I’m not too much into doing all of the spesific variations on one day, as splitting it up gives you more frequency and higher quality of work.
It really was a pleasure reading, and re-iterating over the ideas. Quite happy to try it out now (already did my first session) and tinker as required. It’s not the most beautiful, aesthetically, for instance, that leg press on Monday really sticks out but it makes sense.
It’s alright now, it used to cut hours off of my days (as in, I was in so much pain I’d eventually fall asleep at 7-8 PM as opposed to 10PM/midnight). As long as I’m conscientious of it, I’ll be fine. It did even go away for a while, so I’m hoping for that to happen again and stay that way.
Yeah, I’ll go by feel. I’m taking in inspiration from a lot of different low volume proponents, and it’ll take a while to find the right blend. I don’t have a training partner, so sometimes I think I might end up doing two sets to failure on certain exercises as it’s not possible to extend them with a spotter but I didn’t annotate anything with regards to concentric failure or not.
Anyway, I think I’ll be able to go from this, to 6-8-10 drop-sets (on some exercises at least), to RP and maybe double rest-pause despite being on my lonesome.
It’ll also serve to tell me just how much do I push myself to elicit failure, I mean, I’ve seen write-ups where RPE10 is “can’t get another good rep” and others where the semantics behind RPE10 is quite different. I think this shines through further in say juxtaposing OT rest-periods (90s-120s) against Yates (up to 5 minutes)
Today was quite good, I’m considering getting a mouth guard… It’s almost two hours since my session and I still feel a nice warm sensation in my target muscles so that’s a good sign. The only “bad” thing was no machine pec deck, and only a pec fly machine and I had a tough time not involving my biceps.
I’d rather hit my delts twice, and focus on frequency of stimulus of muscle than movement pattern this first iteration. For novelty.
I threw one in today… and did two sets to failure on the smith. This does not mean I won’t throw in an extra triceps exercise on Monday though.
True, I’m with you on that.
I’ll keep it in mind if I feel that it’s not progressing well. For now, I’ll let providing the shoulders two weekly stimulances win out. It should progress just by virtue of adding some tricep size at this point.
Here was my complete session from today,
Exercise
Friday
Set 1
Set 2
Set 3
Set 4
Notes
A
Military Press
12 (easy)
10 (moderate)
8-10 (hard)
40 kg, 120s
B
Smith Incline
10 (easy)
8 (moderate)
6-8 (F)
6-8(F), bonus!
Low Incline, 25/side, 20/side, 120s
C
Pectoral flye
12
10
8-10 (F)
47, 90s. Did not love these, involved the biceps. Kept a 2s stretch in the bottom position.
D
Lying EZ-bar Triceps Extension
12
10
8-10 (F)
7.5/side,90s
E
Rope Triceps Pushdown or V-bar
12
10
8-10 (F)
10@21.25 (a bit unsure if that was the weight)
F
Single-arm Underhand Tricep Extension
AMRAP (F)
Plenty of eccentric only reps (I let my other hand help)
Yeah, it may not be aesthetic on paper, but it fits great
That sounds really unpleasant. Hopefully you don’t need to deal with that again.
It’s a part of the process, and it’s fun one. (Apart from when you overdo it and feel like dying for a couple of weeks)
That sounds like a plan. If you wanted to peak (which is most likely not a concern for right now) you could switch in a cluster set or a wave loading type of block in the place of the double r/p (or do it after that)
Yeah, the definition varies quote a bit. Personally, I go with can’t get another competition Quality rep (in terms of depth on squat/hips rising on bench/hitching on deads/leg drive on OHP) if I’m training to test my lifts in a mock meet or similar (obviously strongman deads are a bit different). But stuff like a bit of back rounding, head rising on bench, bar moving down a bit or hips shooting up too early, I don’t care about. You’ll just have to set a standard for your self and stick to it.
If you have a dual cabla machine you could use that. I like to do incline flies on it (when I do my annual sessions with flies, I don’t do them too often), feels great.
Sounds like a good idea, and it’s something you can play around with
That looks like a fun session! Certainly more fun than my six sets of squats today
It’s not weird that it is unsymmetric as it is design around something.
Cheers, me too. How’s your back?
Heheh, I have some rhodiola and ashwagandha that could make such a period a little easier to come out of.
Ah, a strength peak. Interesting. I could maybe use that as a carrot to run this two cycles, one without, and one time with.
I like that definition. When I first heard about RPE it was really tough to assimilate, still is. It becomes weirder still when you extend the scale with intensity techniques. Intuitively, and I know this is wrong, I translated RPE 10 quite literally (there is no way to exert yourself more) and I’ve genuinely only had that once when I was in a dire position climbing and falling could have resulted in severe injury. I managed to just “power” through and get myself out of that but it’s not an exertion that is always accessible to me.
You mean replace it with a cable cross-over? Or do incline flies?
A different kind of fun. I feel as if we, who have the luxury to consciously choose our labor and physical toils should maybe “complain” less and rejoice more. If anything, I try and imagine someone coming on to these boards interested in starting to lift and see that we who love to lift make any comment to the contrary might be bad. However, it’s also good that people can share that expression so that those that otherwise identify with the group do not feel like they are imposters when they have a grind-y stint of training.
Sorry, got a bit philosophical there. Hope you had a good night’s sleep!
I don’t know. My experience with this type of training isn’t great. I’m thinking that if what we have on paper right now is done 3 weeks, I can do the next step(s) for 3 weeks each but ultimately my body — not my plans — will dictate when a break is needed. I get that DC and FT need to cruise but they run RP/similar for several weeks. This is a more of a spread out blast.
It’s not weird that it is unsymmetric as it is design around something.