First public log, so I’ll throw out an intro. TLDR version is, I’m squatting a lot for right now.
I’m 34, turning 35 in September. I hope no one minds my posting in this thread, a few months premature. My height and weight are 5’10" and currently averaging around 189lbs. I “cut down” about thirty pounds this past year after 8 years of what we’ll call “bulking”. I wasnâ??t fat, just big boned… Okay, I was fat.
Current PR’s
Bench: 295
Squat: 335 (questionable)
Dead Lift: 355
Prior to being fat, I played sports most of my early life and throughout high school. Mostly baseball and wrestling with a couple of years in football and some tinkering with boxing. After high school, I took up lifting as a way to quell my thirst for activity. I lifted pretty rigorously until I was just about 25. I suffered a knee injury while doing some warm up squats, which is a story for another time. I struggled to recover and finally gave up due to other life commitments at the time. I had made a few feeble attempts to stay in shape, but no real regime was followed until this past year.
My current goal is to rebuild, not only the strength around my knees, but around my chain too. Also, to retrain my body to squat with solid form, on command. I’ve put up 335lb squats this year, which I’m not too pleased about, but even worse, I put them up in shitty fashion. About two months ago, I took a step back and analyzed what was going on.
What I figured out is that I’ve been trying to make a leap from basically not squatting at all for nearly 10 years to where I was when I had 7ish years of training behind me. For anyone wondering, life doesn’t work that way. On my recentish heavy squats, I was having to focus on every aspect of my form, which wasn’t working.
I would pay attention to keeping my chest up and my weight would shift to my toes. I would then make a conscious effort to keep my weight on my heals and my chest would pitch forward. The end result was always terrible form to accompany an already paranoid mind about re-injuring my knee. Accepting the reality of this was humbling.
After sucking up my pride, I decided to drop the weights I was working with and train in volume and frequency. The idea now, is to ingrain squat movements into my body, so my feeble brain isn’t required to check all systems while under heavier loads. I spent a few weeks before I started logging numbers, trying to find the right combination of weight, volume and frequency. What I came up with is this: the frequency and volume will remain roughly the same throughout the cycle, while the weight on working sets increase by 10 lbs each week.
This cycle is setup to run 9 weeks, including an off week before picking back up the final 3 weeks. I started with light weights, as the pounds will sneak up fairly quick.
Sorry for the flood of posts to follow, as I’ll be posting my work on this cycle to this point.
Cheers!