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

LRB Diet - Day 26

BW - ?189?

Squats -
BarX10
95X7
135, 150X5
170X3
195X8

BB Rows -
BarX15
95X8
135X8
115X15

High-Pulls -
115, 135, 145, 155, 155, 155X5

Dips - BWX8, 12, 16, 4, 6

I was pressed for time getting ready to go out of town for the weekend, and had to settle for going to the L@Fitness (formerly B@llys) near my home.  189 seemed like such a drastic drop-off from my last weigh-in that I'm suspicious of the scale.  However, when I set it down to Zero pounds, it counter-balanced correctly so who knows.

I need to be better about putting my head down and doing work when I'm in a strange gym; I always feel wound tight and get a little off my game wanting to get in and get out as fast as possible.  For this session that was manifested by skipping mobility warm-ups and all my core work.  I'll have to make up for all of that in spades next time I'm in the gym.

Nevertheless everything went pretty well.  Squats felt solid, and the results are in-line with steady progress after I reset my form.

I couldnt' really do Pendlays here because I didn't have access to bumper plates at this gym.  So BB Rows trying go keep my low-back parallel to the ground and using a brief dead hang at the bottom of each rep to try and simulate a dead-stop row as much as possible.  The results were predictably slightly off from previous sessions.

For the 2nd month of LRB Dieting, I'm adding in some additional shoulder/trap work inspired by a CNP article.  One of the reasons for choosing now to take my first ever stab at strict dieting, is because I'm going to a sort of weekend camping reunion of college friends at the end of September.  While I'm trying to trim up, I thought I'd also take a stab at building some "movie star" shoulders.  Kind of silly, but also fun.  So for this day, I'm adding in High-Pulls, a movement I've never done, but always wanted to try.  These are done incredibly NOT as a textbook version of the Olympic accessory, but more as an explosive, cheating upright row.  One cool bit of synergy here, is that it seemed to work out very well to use the weight from the back-off set of bent rows as the warm-up weight for the high-pulls.  I worked up to 155, where I was having to really use explosiveness and much face-scrunching to get the 5th rep, and knocked out 3 of those sets.  I used straps on this movement as well.  I really liked this movement, and my delts felt really sore the next day.

Dips were a bit wonky because this gym has a weird, trapezoidal dip apparatus.  Again, getting past this sort of thing is something I need to be able to do.  It's dumb to only be able to have good workouts in my regular gym.  Regardless, my target was to ladder up to, and back down from 16 reps.  I got that top set, but the back off sets were completely crap.