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.