UB: Conditioning Week 1. Bench

Defranco Shoulder Mobility

Bench -
BarX15
95X5
135X2
155X2
170X2X3

OH Extensions - 45X20

Bent Rows - 95X15, 8

BB Curls - 35X15, BarX20X2

Reverse Crunches - X20, 10

Treadmill - 12 minutes, 4.1 speed (2 minutes longer, one point faster than previous block)

This weekend was hell to start the conditioning block on.  Between work and rehearsals I only have Friday night through Sunday day free to train, and this weekend I had auditions on Saturday afternoon that I had to prepare for on Friday night, and cooked and competed in a chili cook-off on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon respectively.  Thus the treadmill.

Good bench session.  These sets of 2 at 85% are more challenging than I expected, but totally do-able.  Kind of cool actually.  I can see why guys like Jamie Lewis like doing lots of sets of heavy triples, doubles, singles.  It'll be interesting to see if these get harder, easier, or one then the other as this block progresses.

I may need to add one more set of OH extensions.  The reason I only did one, is I want to make sure or do as much, or more upper body pulling compared to pushing on this block, but I'm not sure one high-rep set is going to accomplish as much.  I'll think about it for the next bench session when I hopefully won't be as rushed to get out of the gym.

I originally programmed to do Pendlay's here.  I approached this session with that idea, but you need either 45's, bumper, or training plates to do those right.  I didn't want to screw around with the latter two, and I didn't want to do 45's because I wanted to make sure I was getting quality reps, i.e. working the muscle instead of the movement.  Therefore, I used 25's and did strict bent-over hang rows.  That turned out to be correct, as I had trouble squeezing out quality reps in this rep range even with this weight.  Some of that is due to the tension of holding the strict hang position.  Regardless, after some thought, I think inverted rows are going to make more sense here for this block.  I did a few sets of those several weeks back, and was really sore a day or two afterwards for whatever that's worth.  Bodyweight assistance exercises are more in the spirit of this block to me anyhow.

Curls were curls.  I just want to get a big pump in that area, and work to balance out all the elbow extension from heavy pressing.  Ultimatley just dropped down to the empty bar for this.  Not trying to impress anyone.

I've got pretty obnoxious posterior pelvic tilt at this point from my desk job and other things, so I'm going to start doing lots of reverse crunches and see if that starts to balance that out better.  See how that goes and then make adjustments from there.

As I mentioned above, I was really pressed for time all weekend.  I was originally supposed to do either a timed-mile or hammer swings today, but both would have taken a lot more time with travel and/or set-up than just hopping on the treadmill so that's what I did.  On the previous block, I had been doing 10 minutes at a 4.0 pace.  I upped the time and the speed just slightly to get a modicum more intensity than my body had gotten used to, and called it a day.