5/3/1 Full-Body: Cycle 1. Week 1. Squat

BW - 201

Reverse Hyper - 5 sets of 10

Squat -
BarX10
95X5
135X5
160X5
185X5
210X5

Pendlays -
BarX15
95X8
110X8
120X8

Dips - BWX5, 7, 10, 7, 5

Chiropractor Crunches - 5 sets of 20-30

Now that my show is opened and my parents have left town, I'm finally sliding into the program I've been eyeing for a few months.  Namely 531 Full-Body.  Because I'm being an asshat, and not doing exactly the movements laid out by Wendler, this will probably take some calibration.  Case in point, I programmed Pendlay Rows and Dips instead of DB Rows and DB bench for squat day as you can see here.  The dips were fine, however I was going to try and do 8/5/3 for the Pendlays in the spirit of the 5/3/1 lay-out, and that just didn't feel like the way to do it after this first session.  If I had to do this again, I would have repped out 110 instead of working up to 120.  Some of this will be re-acclimating myself to the movement, and some just tweaking for what is going to work best.  Just because Jamie Lewis does heavy sets of 3 on that movement, doesn't mean it's going to work for me.  At least, not yet.

Since I spent a couple of months only doing Pause Squats, I feel much more comfortable going ATG, and that's the way I'm doing my squats going forward.  Accordingly, I needed to drop my training max another 10% down from 279 to 248.  Now.  Everything felt fast and easy until the last two sets here.  Again, there are form issues, as I'm getting to far forward on my toes, and on the last two sets the bar was a little too low on my back to be secure.  This particularly fucked me up on the top set, and is one of the reasons I didn't go for more reps.  Again, full squats as low as I can go with NO pause are new to me, and this will take some getting used to.  Also I'm losing weight, so if I end up needing to drop my max again, I will.

I covered the Pendlays above.  I'm going to still try 8/5/3, but instead of working up to top sets of 80%, 85%, and 90% as I had originally planned, I'll drop it to 70%, 75%, and 80% and look to really rep that top set.

It's been over 4 months since I did Dips.  I can't believe that looking at it.  Anyway, I knew it had been awhile, and that's why I took the up-and-down ladder approach.  They felt really good though.  Nice to have an old friend back.

The chiro team really encouraged me to do more low back isolation work to go along with the swiss-ball crunches they originally prescribed.  In that vein, I plan to open each session with the reverse hypers and close with the crunches.  Can't hurt.