Front Squat: 205-295. 5 sets
Back Squat: 295-365. 5 sets
Deadlift: 365-455. 5 sets
Ab rollout: 2x6x-
I pull DL with a mixed grip. Its harder when my left hand is facing out than when my right hand is facing out. I just feel my grip isn’t as solid, even when I’m using less weight.
On my squats, I notice that I lift so hard, the weight is ‘thrown’ a couple inches (more on the FSquat) into the air and I come up on the balls of my feet. I mention this, because I notice that my best, easiest pushing comes when I push through my heels. Focusing on pushing through the heels for the entire range of motion could help. I don’t currently do it, because after a little bit past half-way, the acceleration is great enough that I’m not worried about failing the lift, I’m worried about how far up in the air I can ‘throw’ it
Texan’s game was on. On an exceptional play, the four or five guys standing around me (the TV is a few feet above and to the right of today’s squat rack) all went “WOO!” Football, bro. It brings people together.
I’m pretty sure I can fairly easily pull 5 plates, and bench 3. Friday and Saturday will be off days, and Sunday- Tuesday workouts should be fairly light (nothing over 80%. I usually work up to 90% for my final set, so I’ll be stopping 20-40 lbs lighter than usual). Then, Wednesday, I’ll go for a PR bench and DL, and Thursday/Friday, a back squat.
Landmine Row: 115-150. 8 sets
Pullups: 30 in 15 minutes (reduced volume, because couldn’t reduce intensity).
Hammer Curls: 30-40. 8 sets
Ab rollouts: 2x7x-
All movements were super-fast and… fun. I can tell when I’ve done a good set of landmine rows, because my back stays flexed after I stand up with a straight back, like it wants to roar its dominance to the rest of the gym. That feeling is actually one of the reasons why I like training with this modified-Thibs approach.
A few digressions before I post up my lifts. First, I’m eating a lot more than I probably should at this point. I’m topping the scale at 285lbs, and I didn’t get there by accident. A usual day in eating looks something like this:
8am: Protein + Coffee, handful nuts (65g pro, 700 kcal)
12pm: 1 lb steak, black beans (116g pro, 1120 kcal)
4pm: 1 lb steak, black beans (116g pro, 1120 kcal)
7pm: PWO shake (2 scoops Surge Recovery, 2 scoops Surge Workout Fuel, 1 tbsp creatine, colorant)
9pm: Dinner (either a pizza with 3/4 lb of chicken, or a box of pasta, a jar of sauce, 2 tbsp of EVOO, a cup of cheese, and 3/4 lb of chicken. Either way, about 3000 kcal. And then I’ll have some butterfingers or other candy, maybe).
And then I’ll go to sleep around 11pm or midnight.
Sometimes I switch the second steak and beans to be just two FINiBARs, and on the weekends I usually wake up late and eat about 1000kcal less than during the week. But that’s what my diet looks like. A shit ton of food right before I go to bed.
On to the things that suck about being big. I’m not to the point where I need a C-pap machine to force air down my gullet because my throat is too heavy for the muscles to support themselves, but there are some significant inconveniences. For instance:
I work on the third floor. I will, seriously, get a back pump walking up the four flights of stairs that lead to the third floor. My muscles have no problem getting there. My legs kick names and take ass all day, but my back makes me want to wander to the wall and catch my breath.
It’s difficult to attach my seatbelt in my car. I have to pull it out over my gut, and the socket it fits into is pushed outwardly by my side, throwing off the angle and requiring me to wrench it away from the door before I can plug it in using an angle that works.
Getting into my car is difficult. I’m 6’3", and ducking my head to get under the roof of my car was a lot easier 50 lbs ago when I didn’t have my tits pushing on my belly.
When my tits meet my belly, I feel like I’m back in middle school.
None of my clothes fit except my workout clothes. The sleeves on my dress shirts have to be rolled up, because it looks unprofessional having them at full length and coming down only to halfway along my forearm. My slacks look like skinny-jeans (just… Dickies, instead of A&F or whoever). My belly makes my shirt come untucked in all but the most restrictive stances, and my entire range of motion just feels stifled. I can’t wait to change clothes at the end of the day, and I hate to wear any formal clothing, because it stretches not in the least.
Wiping my ass is a chore. You think the Rhodestown crew is joking, but the gut makes it difficult to bend forward far enough to position the shoulder in such a fashion that reaching the back end of the ass-crack is manageable. I’m not in danger of wrenching my arm out of my socket, but its really uncomfortable.
I’m claiming a 500 DL. I know I only hit 495. I’m pretty sure if tested, I could get an extra 5 lbs out of it.
Preparation for test day consisted of getting my regular bit of sleep (6.5 hours), taking 2 finibars and a medium starbucks coffee pre-workout, and chugging my usual PWO drink of 2 scoops SWF, 2 scoops surge, and a tsp of creatine during my workout.
PostWO meal consisted of the usual: Beef and pasta with a shitload of toppings.
Landmine Row: 115-170. 9 sets
Pullups: 8 sets of 3, in a variety of different grips. See notes
Hammer Curls: 25-45’s. 6 sets
Instead of doing sets of 3 to the top limit, I think I’m going to go until I hit the ‘max force’ set and just stay around there. I don’t feel the need to push that hard, I just kind of want to see how fast my growth is doing quality sets*
Tried ramping pullup grips. Starting with a narrow neutral grip, moving out to a wide pronated grip. Narrow grip hurt my elbows during the middle of the lift. After I adjusted my grip to be more supinated, the elbow pain completely disappeared! None of the rest of the sets, because they’re a different grip than I usually use, caused my elbow pain. However, I don’t think I want to continue to use them frequently because I felt almost all the strain from the lift in my bicep, not my back, and this exercise, I need for my back.
*‘Quality Set’ is a set that gets my nervous system so hyped that when I finish my muscles involuntarily clench and make me want to bellow my triumph for the gym. They’re fun.
Front Squat: 205-285. 5 sets
Back Squat: 295-345. 5 sets
Deadlift: 365-425. 5 sets
In searching for the ‘max-force-set’, I’m finding that I am most exuberant, my feelings of dominance that I equate to the higheset level of neural activation, after explosively finishing sets of around 80% of my 1 RM. At least, for legs. For upper body, it seems a little higher. Mostly, I’m seeing this after spending a good bit of the day looking over Thibs’s most recent articles. That’s what caused me to look for it in the first place.
Back squat sucked. Wasn’t feeling sets higher than 325. seriously. Don’t know why I bumped weight.
Front Squat kicked ass though. 285 rocked.
Deadlift stopped rocking above 400. Or, at least, rocked less than 400.
For tricep ropedowns, right arm is stronger than left.
Rollouts and flyes are easier to do mid-way through the workout than in the beginning. Neural activation?
Felt run-down walking into the workout. Felt okay walking out. Hips feel beat-up. Probably from squats.
I’m trying to think of ways I can eventually add some form of sled-carry work. As I cut, I’ll need to throw in some steady-state cardio eventually. I want to get a better cardio profile and have more work capacity. I’m not sure how to go about doing that. I want to sled-carry, but I can’t figure out a way to do that while lifting almost every single day. I want to do it after legs, but my gym doesn’t have a prowler, and I usually get out at around 7-8 pm at night, after dark, where I’m very reluctant to spend another hour at a park.
Ideas/solutions are welcome, for when to add cardio when lifting almost every single day and how to go about creating/doing a sled once or twice a week in the evenings.
Pulldowns are done with pronated grip, shoulder-width. Doing this with an arch in my back seems to allow me to move heavier weight, while sparing my shoulders and elbows a lot of stress. Felt great, so I kept running at it.
Wasn’t feeling landmine rows, which is weird, because I usually love that shit.
286 lbs this morning, fasted. Which is weird, because my PWO meals have been roughly half what they usually are. Usually they’re 3k kcals, these days they’re 1.5k, all total. The rest of my diet has stayed roughly the same. Maybe I just need to take a shit to see some weight fluctuate down. Or maybe I need to give it another week. Still tinkering to see what the least I need to do to my diet to start seeing fat loss.
Front Squat: 205-275. 5 sets
Back Squat: 275-335. 5 sets
Deadlift: 335-405. 5 sets
Ab rollout: 1x8x-
Honestly guys, don’t expect to see a lot of change in the upcoming weeks. After reading a lot of Thibs’ new articles and realizing I’m not THAT intent on SEEING my weights go up, I’m ramping up to ~85%/~80% on my upper/lower-body lifts, making sure to lift as fast and explosively as I can. In six weeks, I might be bumping my weights 5-10 lbs based on how I feel lifting them (as I will during the workouts). The point is, instead of lifting in sets of three until I feel I can’t DOMINATE the next set, I’ll be intentionally stopping earlier.
Its a risk, and I’m not sure it’ll pay off, but I’ve got the time to spend. In the next year, all I really wanna do is lose fat, and if my strength stays the same or only goes up a little bit, thats totally okay with me. Even if my strength goes down (which I don’t expect to happen), I’ll have a rebound at the end of my cut to probably get it back up.
So long story short, this is going to turn into a really, really boring blog. Moreso than it usually is.
As soon as I can figure out how to add in some form of metabolic training.
Treadmill, Incline:10, Speed: 2.5 Time: 10 minutes
Wanted to give these and a few other things a try. ================================================================
By the end, I was drenched like leg-day at waterworld. Apparently, even thinking about cardio makes me sweat, most likely in fear.
Circuit was fun, could feel myself getting amped. Especially loved long-jumping. My distance really does improve, though whether thats from skill or nervous amp, I couldn’t tell. However, my elbows HURT. Partly, theres just a lot of tension put on them from the pushups, and I probably should have eased into that. But swinging the medicine ball around also gave my elbows and shoulders a lot of whip, which probably didn’t help. Maybe power-snatches are a good replacement for these? Kind of upper-body, but still done super-fast?
I probably could have walked in today and done a regular push day, I just didn’t because I figured my body could use at least one day off each week. Come to think of it, that’s not that strange a claim. A neural charge workout is probably a good thing to do on that day. I don’t actually think it’ll make great changes, but its fun to do, and its not hurting.
Tried pushing the tread on a treadmill. Too easy. No way to get serious Eccentric leg work from this. HOWEVER, walking at a decent clip but severe incline (10 is pretty severe, I think) gives great GPP to my legs and calves, which, I think, are sorely lacking. I’d be totally okay doing some hill-walking after leg day for my cut except…
My back hurts. Like, doing cardio makes my lower back burst into its typical chronic Low-back-pain mode, like its got a pump AND cancer and can’t wait to show me both. This happens during workouts, but its not usually a big deal, because I just lay-down in-between sets. I can’t really do that with cardio. Some days its better than others, so I haven’t completely discounted it and something useful. But…
I think that the first 20-30 lbs of my cut are going to be lost through diet. I was favoring a subtle approach, where I slowly lower overall calories, and then carbs, and then a few other things, but the more I experiment and think about how to go about this, the more convinced I am that I need to lose the first chunk of fat fast, and then take a slower time getting rid of the rest of it. Mostly because activities will be easier and I’ll feel better at a lighter weight, and it’s probably worth buying the time to take a month off during the cut to reset my metabolism. And if I keep it short (as in, the time between New Years and the Fast), the odds of losing strength are low. Especially if I do it right. I’ll just have to somehow manage to not being an asshole to all my friends.
