Wait - your calves are the same size as your neck? Really?
Pretty close, last time I checked. Everything is 18 1/2 inches, give or take slightly.
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I just had a curiosity check, my neck and calves are pretty close, but my arms are lagging behind a bit.
My neck is pretty slim and my calves are nonexistent, so I’m pretty sure if I measure them it’d come out that my arms are overpowering (!!). So yeah, now I can say I have big arms. period.
Anyway, back to business.
I got the second training day under my belt. Tough one, pretty much like yesterday.
I added three sets for delts (2 sets of lateral raises and 1 of rear delt raises, bringing the total to 8 sets for this workout) like I had talked about. Doing two sets of laterals to failure and then a triple dropset had my delts blow up, same for the three sets of 25 on the rear raises.
I still f’ing hate the overhead press though. I hate that exercise. I feel I get nothing out of it.
Chest was decent. I never seem to be able to be efficient on my dropset for the db presses–when I go to failure and I drop the weight, then get back into position, I feel so woobly. I feel I can’t control the weight, and I never get more than about 5 reps, even dropping from 34 to 26 kg db’s.
As far as the barbell bench, this time round I decided to actually do what the program says and set up a slight incline inside a power rack. I’m getting used to the movement but it mostly feels okay.
One thing I tried, which I had disregarded on my previous training cycle, is the “assisted dip pushdown.”
This exercise here:
It didn’t quite work like I hoped though. The issue is my machine looks like this:
(I’ll never quite understand what’s on the mind of the guy that chooses the equipment at my gym)
The problem with this machine is you don’t have any elbow freedom laterally, and you really can only keep them tucked. It did give me a pretty good pump actually, and I liked the motion, but it felt incredibily awkward. Such a shame: I think this exercise has some potential.
I can’t wait till I have arms that size, man
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Then you blow past it and get old like me and wish you weren’t so small now. I was just a hair under 20" arms at one point.
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How long did it take you?
Not sure, as it wasn’t a goal, I just measured one day when I was actively competing in Strongman and bam. I had been training Strongman for a few years at that point.
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Gotcha. I kinda think mine should have been bigger by now, after 4 years of consistent training. I guess I gotta train harder!
Does pwn still read your log 
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I don’t know if he does, but he probably wouldn’t like this…
I can’t help but dislike this exercise though! I do understand its importance and I’m not giving up on it, but it just never feels right. The only exception to this is the smith machine ohp: I can actually feel my delts on that.
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Good! Great! I feel if everything clicks for you, you’ll have a fucking blast and get even bigger!
We have almost the same arm size I have half an inch more
Perfect! I’m never feeling bad doing arms work again then because I am late ahahah
It felt really weird to me, especially on the wrists but the feeling was decent enough!
You don’t feel the delts or what?
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Yeah, that.
Plus the movement always has some slight degree of awkwardness to it; something that doesn’t happen with most other kinds of press for me (incline, flat, barbell, dumbbell, whatever).
Yeah, one thing I noticed is that I would end up putting all the pressure on the outer part of my hands/wrists. So the force applied wasn’t distributed evenly throughout the hands, which made it feel weird (although not painful, unlike I would have imagined as my wrists are problematic)
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I do, things are just real far out of my wheelhouse these days.
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yeah, I remember “bodybuilding” training (allow me to use the term here, I know I’m not a bodybuilder hahaha) not being your thing. the end of goal of being big though, you certainly do know about!
I want to say though that many of the things I learned from you are still being applied to my current regimen. any time I feel something might be too hard or difficult, I just go “suck it up and do it anyway” mode, which is a mindset I did not use to have until I met you on here
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I am not too proud to say that I am legit envious of you and all the younger dudes that got to learn all this stuff much earlier than I did, haha. You’re all set for some huge success.
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I must admit that reading PWN has also made me think twice about doing that extra set or rep I don’t want to do and that I’m actually capable of doing, and recover, and progress is showing, soooo thanks!
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So today I must have pulled some muscle in my neck while doing heavy partial lateral raises. Fuck.
I was close to failure and my form must have deteriorated. I felt a very sharp pain in my neck. I still finished my session, but as time passed I started realizing how bad it is.
Any movement that involves neck flexion (which stretches the muscles that I allegedly pulled) is extremely painful and limited. I have been laying down the whole day and now that I’m getting ready to go out, it still hurts pretty bad.
I hope it’ll be gone in two days, otherwise I’ll have a blast training back on Monday.
I have these types of pulls all the time - a lot of time the pain is actually referred pain from a spot a little further down your back. If you can get a golf ball or something around that size and hard, lying down on it and letting it sink into the affected area can get it to release a bit. Don’t overdo it, and it’ll be painful as shit, but it can loosen things up a bit.
Usually takes anywhere from 2 days to a week to really go away. Heavy partial lateral raises really do fry the shoulders, but your head had better be in a good position because you’re inadvertently using a lot of traps/neck/back muscles to move the weight. Sucks, I know.
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