LRB 365: Strong-15 Short. Week 1. Bench

BW - 195

Bench -
BarX15
85X5
95X4
115X3
125X2
145X1, 1
155X1

115X22, 6

Incline - 85X15, 7

Dips - BWX12, 10, 9, 7, 6

Session was good/OK.  The 155 on bench was curiously heavy, but 115X22 is a PR from 17 reps on up.  Grain of salt there because I've only pushed reps at that weight once before, and that was at the beginning of the Strong-15 last December.  But at that time, I only got 115 for 15, and noted at the time that the bar was moving slow.  That was not the case with the 115X22 today.  And this projects to be inside 10 lbs. of a perceived 1RM increase.  Feels on target.

As I mentioned in my last squat post, I'm doing additional back-off sets per a suggestion in the manual.  With Squats, the manual calls for 2 sets of 3 of Pause Squats, but I did 4 sets and when the last rep of that 4th set was slow coming up, I moved on to assistance work.  Bench is different because the back-off sets are AMAP, so I'm using one of Paul Carter's favorite techniques: 50% sets.  I would have liked to have gotten closer to 11 (half the reps from the first set) on my 2nd back-off set, but sometimes you're so gassed from the first 50% set, it's hard to imagine you'll get even 1 rep on the 2nd.  It was like that here, and that's OK.

I've got the option as well to do more than 2 sets on Incline, but this turned out to be another 50% set, and so I let it be.

There's no prescribed number of sets/reps for the Dips.  The manual just says "body x lots," and 5 sets felt about right.  These were all AMAP sets where I barely got the last rep or failed when I attempted the next one.

Also, should note that as I've pulled some carbs back out of my diet again, my BW increase has dropped back off to where I was about 2 weeks ago.  I'm going to try to up the protein/veggie intake and see if I can SLOWLY get it to start going up again that way.  If it stalls out, I'll revisit some additional carbs, but I was starting to feel a little sloppy over the last couple weeks.