LRB 365: LRB Split. Week 2. Squat - Light

BW - 194

Front Squats -
BarX10
85X5
95X5
105X5
115X4
125X3, 3
135X8 (Rep PR)

Leg Extensions - X33, 30, 25, 24

Lunges - BWX24, 22, 22, 22

Adductor Machine - X27, 20, 24, 20

135X8 is a Rep PR on Fronts, projects to a new 1RM, and I left reps in the tank.  The program calls for 5, 4, 3, 3, 3 to a top triple.  What I wanted to do for the cycle is hit a 3 Rep PR that also projects an increased 1RM on the last session.  Initially, I determined what that set would need to be (155X3), and programmed back to work up to it.  However, since this is more of a body-building day, I decided to hit the last set for reps, 531 style, and ended up with an all-around PR.  I'm going to keep the same weights that I've programmed, but keep going for rep maxes if I feel good like I did today. 

I kept the same weight as last time for extensions, and just got more reps.  I might up the weight slightly next time.

Adductor machine was occupied, so I did lunges next.  I played around with  my form to try to shift the emphasis from where it had been (my glutes) to my quads.  I kept my upright posture, but stepped out just far enough that my heel could stay on the ground at the bottom of the lunge.  This seemed to work well, and we'll see if I have any glute soreness again.

Jumped on the adductor machine after this and upped the weight from last time.  Had to drop it back down after the 2nd set, though.  Want to make sure I'm getting quality reps.

I programmed for sit-ups this day, but I was way short of time and had to bolt.  Same old story.

LRB 365: LRB Split. Week 2. Press - Light

BW - 196

DB Press - 20sX25, 20, 17

Incline -
85X10 (fuck)
65X18, 15

Rear-delt flyes - 15sX26, 23, 18, 16, 15

Bench Dips - BWX30, 20, 16, 15, 13

My best friend was in town this weekend, and this training session paid the price of the late nights and partying.

DB Presses were fine, but I was sweating like crazy after the first set.

Incline was real crap-tastic.  I've done 125 for 10 once before, and 105 for 10 on several occasions.  This 85 was supposed to be shooting for 20, so that sucked.  To be fair, my shoulders were pre-exhausted from the DBs and this particular bench is steeper than most.  But still.  Crappy.

Delt flyes happened.

Bench dips were supposed to be on the heavy pressing day, but it wasn't convenient to do them at my away gym during that session.  I will just try to get them on one session or another.  I think 30 is probably a PR.

LRB 365: LRB Split. Week 1. Back - Light

BW - 195

RDL -
95X10
135X8
185X6
205X5, 5, 8

Pull-downs - X25, 20, 20, 20, 20 (to a top set)

BW Hypers - 4 sets of 15

Machine Curls - X25, 25, 25 (to a top set)

Hanging Leg Raises - BWX5, 6, 7, 6, 5

205X8 is a Rep PR on RDLs.  Gonna push the weight and the reps on these.  Looking for a 5 rep PR by the end of the cycle.

With pull-downs I focused on holding each rep at my chest for a beat on the early sets, and making sure the bar touched my chest on the top sets.

Hypers were really burning.  Trying to keep my glutes relaxed, and keep as much of the tension on my erectors as I can.

Gonna use the biceps machine on the light back day for the cycle.  Just to see.

I'm adding ab work to two of the light days on this cycle.  I have to get in the habit of keeping that as an integral part of my programming if I want to get stronger there.  On these leg raises, I brought my feet to the bar on every rep, and tried to resist the descent.

LRB 365: LRB Split. Week 1. Squat - Heavy

BW - 193

Squat -
BarX10 (paused)
95X5 (paused)
135X5
155X4
185X3
195X2
205X1
215X1
225X1

Front Squat -
85X10
95X10
105X10
115X10

Machine Leg Press - X10, 10, 10, 14 (to a Top Set)

Alternating Lunges - BWX30, 26, 24, 22

I'd been looking forward to the first leg day of this split for a few weeks now, and I'm not disappointed.

Squats are all strong.  The way I programmed the Strong-15 for this cycle was to hit the same top single, 245, at the end, that I've been hitting occasionally on the last two cycles.  I want to feel like I own 245 so that when 255 and 265 come along, weights I've shakily done before, I will feel more confident than ever with them.  My thought right now is to hit 275 again at the end of the upcoming strength cycle.  That would be 10 lbs. more than what I hit at the beginning of this program, and match my all time 1 Rep attempt.  Would love to smoke that.  It will all depend on how I'm feeling at the end of this cycle, but I won't program any higher than that.

115X10 on Fronts is a Rep PR.  Having trouble keeping the bar from rolling forward on the heaviest sets.

Regular leg press was mucho ocupado, so I had to settle for the machine leg press.  Whatever, it's all body-building.

Lunges were pretty brutal after all of the above.  I rest/paused sets 2-4.  I really feel my glutes today, and I think that's because of the way I do lunges.  Keeping an upright torso and shin i.e. not leaning forward or allowing my knee to travel forward very much.  Something about that must shift to my glutes, because they're often sore the day after higher-rep lunges.

LRB 365: LRB Split. Week 1. Press - Heavy

BW - 197

Press -
BarX10
65X5
85X5
95X5, 5
105X5

Bench -
95X5
105X4
125X3
135X2, 2
145X1
155X1

Upright Rows - 85X10, 10, 10, 10, 10

V-Bar Pushdowns - X35, 30, 18, 15, 12

Forgot shorts, and had to work out in jeans.  The confusion caused me to forget my mobility and stretching warm-ups until I was half-way through my Press sets.  Ha.

Press felt good.  My goal for this cycle is 125X5, or 10 more pounds a week.  That would be a PR.  Could be ambitious, but since Bench isn't getting pushed as hard, gotta shoot for assistance PRs.

Bench was fine.  155 is well below my Every Day Max, so I focused on getting tight and moving it fast.

Upright Rows were solid.  If I can hit either 105 for multiple sets of 10, or for more than 10 reps in one set by the end of the cycle, that will be a PR.  Again, that's adding 10 lbs. a week.

I want to do bench dips for my triceps assistance on this day, but there wasn't a good/free spot in the gym to set up for these, so I opted for push-downs.  However, I almost exclusively do rope push-downs, so I thought I would switch that up anyway.  Will the grip matter?  Will I be able to do bench dips next time?  Will I vacillate uncertainly between different movements every week?  Who cares.  It's triceps assistance.  Just get some work in.

LRB 365: Off-Week Training. Back

BW - 190

GMs -
BarX8
95X8
115X8
135X8, 8

 Wide-grip pulldowns - X20, 20, 16 (to a top set)

Hypers - BWX18, 16

Machine Curls - X28, 11/5 (to a top, drop-set)

Hanging Leg-Raises - 5X5

Good-Mornings are a new movement to me.  Felt it in my back yesterday, but feel it in my hamstrings today.  Interesting.

LRB 365: Off-Week Training. Legs

BW - 193

Front Squat -
BarX10
65X8
95X5
105X4
115X3
125X3, 3

Leg Press -
2ppsX10
2.5ppsX10
3ppsX10

Leg Extensions - X26, 20, 20

Adductor Machine - X34, 26, 25

Continuing to get back in the saddle with some movements I haven't done in awhile, or am unfamiliar with.  Front Squats were fine, even strong feeling through a smooth ROM.  The top 2-3 weights felt like work weight, but the the top triples were still smooth as could be.

I checked my logs, and I haven't done a leg press since April 2011, and it looks like I did it a grand total of 7 times.  Actually, now that I think back, I don't think that was a proper leg press, but rather one of those machines where you sit in the slidy chair and push away from the pad.  Whatever.  Worked up to 3 plates per side.  I'll probably stick with that as goal weight again for the 1st week of the upcoming LRB Split, and then look to move on from there.

I don't even have a log of having done a leg extension.  I know I did them some in high-school, and again in my mid-20s.  I just picked a weight and went for max reps on each set.

Definitely never done the Adductor machine before.  Nothing really to note about it.

LRB 365: 100 Reps and Conditioning. In Review

The 2nd and 3rd phases of the LRB 365 program are complete.  The High-Rep Lifting/Conditioning Acclimation and Conditioning Peaking phases respectively.

The high-rep/acclimation phase was 6 weeks, and the peaking phase was intended to be 6 weeks.  However, due to a long vacation and some other scheduling considerations, the peaking phase went for 8 weeks as I chose to repeat weeks 3 and 4 after my vacation.  So 15 weeks total (including vacation) comprising all of March, April and May, and a chunk of February and June as well.  That's important to keep in mind.

This whole section of the program is a little bit more difficult for me to wrap my mind around, because I've never done any serious dieting, and I didn't do any for this until the final 4 weeks.  As a result, this felt more like "working-out," rather than training towards any kind of specific goals. 

So for the High-Rep/Acclimation phase there's not a lot to say.  I got a lot of snappy reps in on the big lifts, and a ton of high-reps in on support work.  I learned that I hate walking in the weighted-vest.  Not because it was particularly hard, but because it was boring as hell.  I actually like going for walks, but because I live in a major urban center, and have occasional gang-violence in my neighborhood, neither my wife nor I were particularly comfortable with my walking willy-nilly through our part of town in what looks like a bullet-proof vest.  Also there were some school shootings this year, and the Boston bombings.  What I ended up doing was picking a straight section of sidewalk right by our building that avoided major roads, schools, and public buildings.  It was about a 7.5 minute walk one-way, and I would walk back and forth on it until I made time.  Like I said, boring as hell.  For the HIIT, I started off just doing interval sprints on the treadmill, but for the last two weeks the weather started to improve, and I decided to take it out to my hill.  I decided to do the %'s for the first week of the peaking phase here so that I could easily slide into that phase.  My hill is something like 65-70 yards, and I took an initial max time of 13.5 seconds.  Week 1 of the peaking phase calls for 10 sprints at 75% of that, or 18 seconds.  Hardest part of this was going that slow.

For the Peaking Acclimation phase, the program doesn't prescribe specific percentages on the lifts, but just leaves it up to you as long as you stick to the over-warmup technique.  I've been enamoured for a long time with the idea of 45/25 training to I stuck close to that.  45/25 meaning that as much as possible you try to only use 45 and 25 lb. plates.  The idea being that these big jumps will force you to really dominate a given weight before you jump to the next higher weight.  This worked fine and kept everything nice and snappy throughout the program.  It also gave me the freedom to back-off a little on some days, or push a little on days I felt strong.  I liked it a lot.

The evil bastard parts of this phase are the body-weight ladder/circuits.  Four bodyweight movements done in circuit laddering up to a top set and back down again.  The upper body day was particularly brutal because you do "heavy" bench or incline and then follow that with a ton of dips and push-ups which strain the hell out of your already fatigued triceps, plus chins and full hanging leg-raises which just take a lot of energy to do.  I was so pathetic at all of this the first week that I slashed all the prescribed rep intervals back to intervals of 2 (some of intervals are as high as 5), and slowly worked my way up throughout the phase.  I managed to work everything back up to the prescribed intervals except for push-ups.  I got these up to intervals of 4 on lower body day (when my pressing muscles weren't fatigued from pressing and dips), and intervals of 3 on upper body day.  I feel positive about this.

As my schedule crunched down on me in May, something had to give and that something was the walking.  I hated the weighted-vest walking, and was having trouble even justifying separate walking sessions within my schedule.  I ended up just using the 20 minute walks to and from the gym, and to and from the hill to stand in.  Did what I had to do.

The hill-sprints went great.  By the final week I was hitting the challenging but doable 15 sprints @ 90% with confidence.  My left knee was a little aggro at the end, but it was the end, and now it has some time to recover.

Once I decided to do some real dieting, I had a solid little drop in weight as well.  When I started 365 in mid-December I was fluctuating between 199-205.  At the end of Phase 1 (Strong-15), I was staying in the 198-201 range.  At the end of Phase 2 (High-Rep/Acclimation), I was 196-199.  When I got back from vacation, I had done 4 weeks of Phase 3 (Conditioning Peaking) and had decided to repeat weeks 3 and 4 before continuing with weeks 5 and 6.  At this point I was holding steady in the 195-198 range.  I decided to cut out all carb-dominant foods except for one cheat night a week to allow for socializing and/or nights out with the wife.  Within 5 days, I shed about 4-5 lbs. that have stayed off, and I've been bouncing between 190-191 at every weigh-in.  The only exception to the diet was alcohol.  I try to make less-bad choices, but the way we live, I just ended up having a drink or two a couple nights a week outside of my cheat meal.  This upcoming week is a 50%, or light week in the gym, and then we're going camping with a bunch of friends for the weekend.  The camping trip will mark the end of low-carbing for awhile, as I look to add some quality mass in the upcoming phase.

Overall these two phases were a gigantic mind-fuck for me, but a learning experience as a result.  I got very much to the point where I was fantasizing about other programs that would give me the feedback I wasn't getting here, i.e. weight on the bar.  I'm very glad I stuck with it.  I had a real wake-up moment when I realized that this had been 15 weeks.  So what kind of seemed like an eternity really was a good chunck of a lifting year.  I don't know if I can explain it now, but this made me feel a lot better about everything.  Looking back on the program, I see that I set aside 15 weeks to recover a little bit from the Strong-15, get my conditioning up, and even start to explore how my body reacts to some classic low-carb dieting.  I pushed through all those brutal body-weight circuits and was feeling strong(er) on them by the end.  I'm eager to start doing the body-building type stuff on the next phase, and see if I can build some mass and additional confidence/perspective to take me into the strength phase that will follow that.  If I were to run this program again next year, I think I might dread these 12 or so weeks, but I may also look back and find they were invaluable.

LRB 365: Conditioning. Week 6. Hills 2

Hill-Sprints - 15 Hills @ 90%

Well there's a big difference in between running these with almost a week off, and only one day off.  Much harder this session, and I went over the target time by a 1/2 second on about half my sprints.  Not crying about it, because I was still getting the hard work in.  My knees, particularly my left one, are doing a bit of crying, however.  But this was the last run, so they've got lots of time to settle down.

LRB 365: Off-Week Training. Press

BW - 191

Press -
BarX20
65X5
85X5
95X5, 5, 5

DB Press - 20sX20, 17

DB Rear Delt Flyes - 15sX23, 18, 16

Bench Dips - BWX25, 20, 15, 15

I'm gonna take the off week between cycles to do some of the stuff from the upcoming LRB Split cycle.  I'm going to leave out most of the Big-3 and do a mix of the lighter weight body-building style movements, and the movements that I'm less familiar with or haven't done in a long time.  I'll generally cut these short by a set or two compared to the actual cycle programming.  This is supposed to be an off-week after all.

Forgot how much I love standing OHP.  This weight isn't exciting for me, but I just feel awesome standing and pressing weight overhead.

I sat for the DB presses though.  Mixing it up, boyee.

Rear delt flyes are actually one of the movements I've done most in my life.  In high-school and again in my mid-20s when I started fucking around in the gym, I always used to focus really hard on shoulder training.  And yet this movement has always felt awkward as hell.  Still does.

Bench dips felt ridiculous after all the full BW dips on the Conditioning cycle.  Ha, probably should have gotten more than 25 for all that though!  Something to shoot for on the upcoming cycle.

LRB 365: Conditioning. Week 6. Hills

Hill-Sprints - 15 Hills @ 90%

This went better than I expected.  Possibly because I had an AB&J and coffee before I left work.  I took 30 second breathers after the 5th and 10th hills similar to what I did on the first set of 85% last week.  I felt like I could have kept running after the 15th hill, though, and in fact I jogged part of the way home.  Plan to cut the breathers out tomorrow.  That will be the final round of sprints for the cycle.

LRB 365: Conditioning. Week 6. Incline

BW - 190

Incline -
BarX20
95X5, 5
115X3, 3
135X1, 1
155X1

BW Ladder Circuit -
Dips - 3 up to 15, back down to 3
Chins (neutral) - 2 up to 10, back down to 2
Push-ups - 3 up to 15, back down to 3
Leg-Raises - 3 up to 15, back down to 3

Forgot to do the back-off set on incline.  Don't know why.  Everything felt good.

Best run through on the upper body ladders of the whole program.  No rest/pause.  Just in time to be done with them!

LRB 365: Conditioning. Week 6. Deadlift

BW - 191

Front Squats -
BarX5
95X5

Deadlift -
135X5
155X4
185X3
225X2
275X1, 1, 1
225X5

BW Ladder Circuit -
Squats - 5 up to 25, back down to 5
Sit-ups - 5 up to 25, back down to 5
Chins (supinated) - 2 up to 10, back down to 2
Push-ups - 4 up to 20, back down to 4

Warmed-up with some super-light front squats just to start getting the movement back in my body.

Deadlifts were all fast and strong.  Really hammered the 225X5, and my hamstrings were really sore the next day.

Ladders were great.  No rest/pause on anything.  Not even push-ups.

LRB 365: Conditioning. Week 5. Hills 2

Hill-Sprints - 15 sprints @ 85%

Only had to take a breather after the 8th sprint.  Non-stop otherwise.