Reverse Safety Bar Box Squats ("Eliminators") - 210X4, 4 @7/8
Rower - HIIT; 8 rounds / 14 minutes
Bench strength dipped significantly this week. I think I can begin to approximate normal training next week, or for sure the week after.
I think I'll drop the weights on the PLs back about 20 lbs. and try to add the volume back in quickly. I should be able to hit some 4X6 PRs on Bench and DL pretty quickly once I'm acclimated to the Volume. For Squat we'll just have to see how long I go before I start to plateau.
8 weeks is the longest I've pushed it since I started structuring my blocks Mike T-style. Lately I've been hitting the wall around 5-6 weeks. But I've been cruising at this lower volume/lower frequency for ~3 weeks already and I have no idea how my body will react when I increase both within the same cycle.
This block is composed of one session cycles so that I can try and see how much improvement I can get before I go on a short vacation mid-July. I'll probably only get 5 session/cycles in before my trip. Mike Tuschsherer did this in the last year or so, and that's where I got the idea. My intuition says it will be fairly tough to do the same exact workout each training session and expect to see weight increase, but I'm looking forward to finding out what happens.
To try and give myself the best chance of this working well, I based everything on a Meta-Block Review from the RTS on-line app. It suggests that these rep and RPE ranges on the mains, and these assistance movements should be my best bang for the buck.
Squat and Bench movements all went fairly well. I think I may see that Bench and Deadlift lag a bit on this program because they've been first order movements the last several blocks, but here they will be relegated to competition order. Bench performance seemed to be hitting a bit of a wall by the time I got to the close-grips.
Deadlift was much more difficult. Again, possibly the shift from first to third order. The target RPE here is 8.5 and I both overshot that and undershot my original target weight of 390.
Plate deficits were really wonky on the one warm-up set I took on them, but that gave me enough feedback to make some adjustments, and the work set felt pretty good. Came in a touch under target RPE, but at the end of the workout, I didn't want to push more volume
Haven't done rear-foot elevated split squats since Jan '15. So awkward.
A brief exchange with Mike Tuchsherer led me to decide to go into another brief pivot while my low back heals up. 2-day pivot cycle. Hopefully just doing one and then jumping into another dev block on Monday.
