3 Day FB Hypertrophy. Cycle 3. Session D.

sRPE @8

BW - 222

Deadlift - 325X3, 3, 3 @~5

031 Tempo Work w/ Intensity Techniques:

-    Leg Curls w/ Lengthened Partial Drop-Sets - X10/5, 8/4 @10

-    Pull-Downs w/ Lengthened Partial Drop-Sets - X12/3, 8/3 @10

-    Machine Flyes w/ Lengthened Partial Drop-Sets - X10/4, 9/3 @10

Stationary Bike - HIIT; 10 minutes

Wasn't sure how the reduction in set volume this cycle combined with everything being taken "past failure" would effect recovery markers.  Generally I feel as well or better recovered than when I was doing more sets further from failure, and the various trackers in the RTS app seem to agree.

I had provisionally conceived of this as "Deload by HIT," but I wasn't sure how that would play out in practice.  Jury is still out, but it's looking like a "maybe."

Mid-Rep Volume PRs. Week 5. Session C.

sRPE @7.5

BW - 212

Deadlift - 

385X1 @7

315X9, 9, 9 @7/8

Cambered Bench - 135X6, 6, 6 @6

Reverse Cambered Bench - 205X15 @9

Pull-Downs (myo-reps) - X17, 5, 5, 3, 3 @~10

DB Incline - 50sX12, 10 @~8

315 for 2 and 3 sets of 9 are Volume PRs.

Erector and Quad achiness are starting to get pretty continual so probably about time to deload and start a new block.  Hoping a 3X10 PR will be there for me on Squats on Monday, and then will probably pull back.

BBM Peaking Block. Cycle 5. Session B. Deload

BW - 212

sRPE @5

Squat - up to 315

Bench - up to 205

Deadlift - up to 365

Pre-Meet Deload

Worked up to 85% of planned openers.

Reps and Volume. Week 13. Accessories

BW - 210

PBN -
BarX20
65X5
85X4
95X3
115X2
105X11, 6
super-set with
Chin-Ups - BWX10, 6, 6, 6, 6, 4 (38 total reps)

DB Rows - 65X20, 18

Machine Pullover - X15 (burn-out set)

RG Preacher Curls - 50ishX15, 10
super-set with
DB Press - 40sX20, 10

DB Curls - 30sX15, 12
super-set with
Rolling Triceps - 30sX15, 12

Mixed session.  105X11 is a Rep PR and together with the 17 total reps meets my goal for that weight.  Move up to 115 next week.

Because my low back strain is lingering and I haven't done my regular Deadlift day in a few weeks, I decided to replace pull-downs with DB rows for a while so that in the meantime I'm getting a more well-rounded approach to Back.

I didn't seem to have any gas left by the time I got to Arms.  Except for DB Press where the 40sX20 is an all-around PR.  However, I got less reps on everything else with the same weight as last week.

I also sat up after the last set of Rolling Triceps with the weight still over my chest, and re-aggravated my low back a bit.  Yay.  I will probably just take this entire week off from training to try and get this healed.  If arm training is going to aggravate it, what could be safe?

LRB 365: Big-15. Phase 2. Week 1. Bench and Squat

Saturday -
BW - 196

Bench -
BarX15
85X5
105X4
125X3
155X2
175X1

165X8, 5

Chins (V-Grip) -
BWX5
+15X5
+20X3, 3
+25X2
+30X1

+25X7, 3
BWX5

DB Bench -
60sX20, 8
55sX9, 7

Monday -
BW - 200

Calf Raises - 3 sets of 15

Squat -
BarX10 (paused)
95X5 (paused)
115X5
145X4
175X3
225X2
255X1

215X10, 5

Standing Leg Curls - X20, 20, 20, 12 (each leg; no rest between 1st and 2nd, and 3rd and 4th sets)

Single-Leg Press - 1ppsX15, 15, 15, 12 (per leg)

Back into it after a week off.  I went very low carb during my down week and dropped around 5 lbs.  What makes that interesting is that 165X8 on bench is a Rep PR.  My previous best was 165X7 at 203.  So a PR even at the leverage disadvantage.

I videoed my chins to see if I was cheating or cutting them high.  I have mixed feelings about what I see in the video.  On my phone it looked bad, but it looks okay on a larger screen.  Think I will first try keeping my heels back towards my butt and see how that feels/looks.

My goal for the cycle on DB Bench is 65sX15.  Should be close to that now, and will switch to them next session.

I'm still playing around a lot with squat form, and it was going pretty well on the first session back, but then I started having some pain at the top of my left quad.  It was particularly limiting on the back-off set with 215 where the weight felt fine, but the pain limited me.  Here's a vid of the 175X3 set that I took to check my form mid-way through:

Getting a bit more sit-back, and the depth is still good.

Standing single-leg curls were particularly brutal trying to go back and forth with no rest. 

Left quad pain was still there for the single-leg presses, but I think pushing through them may have helped.

LRB 365: Big-15. Phase 1. Week 6. Squat

BW - 202

Squat -
BarX10 (paused)
95X5 (paused)
115X5
145X4
175X3
215X2
245X1

205X16, 6

Bench -
BarX10
95X5
135X3
155X2
175X2
185X2

Deadlift -
135X5
185X3
225X2 (mixed-grip from here)
275X2
315X2
325X2

I had to take three days off from the gym before this session, so I was hungry as hell to lift.  I've also got this next week off before I start the 2nd Big-15 cycle.  So I decided that doing leg curls and BW lunges after my squatting wasn't going to cut it.  I realized later that this is the first time I've ever done all 3 lifts in one session.

Squats were okay.  After looking at the videos I started taking recently, I think my mechanics are way off for low-bar.  I've been breaking hard at the knees and they've been traveling past my toes, my torso is too vertical, and my depth way past parallel.  Basically I think I've been high-bar squatting with a low-bar setup.  I started trying to correct that with this session and taking video of the low-rep work-sets (form breakdown is pretty common for me with high rep squats, and that's why I didn't video those):

A little bit of progress here, although these still "feel" high to me despite all being well past parallel.  I'll keep working on this.

For bench and deadlift, I looked at my rep records and decided that I had plenty of head-room to set 2-rep PRs in both.  This was NOT working up to a 2-rep max.  I simply could see from the data that I was much stronger than my best 2-rep lifts.

With bench the 185X2 was smooth and fast as hell.  It actually felt easier than the 175X2 before it.  Right now 185 projects to be around my 5 rep max, and it definitely felt strong.  This was great.

For Deadlift, it was a little bit different.  For one thing, the previous two lifts, particularly the squats, had taken some wind out of my sails.  For another, Pandora would only play hip-hop and punk on my gym station, and I really wanted some Slayer hahahahaha.  So 335X1 is my best ever deadlift, and I've hit that a couple of times.  However, I've done 315X5 also, and 315X1 a million times and fast.  So I was pretty sure that it should be there for me without much trouble, but Deadlift is such a beautifully enigmatic monster, that there was a niggle of concern.  I knew it would be mixed grip so I switched to it early.  Chalked up well for the last two sets.  315X2 was fast and easy, but my back and glutes were feeling fatigued, and the mixed-grip was feeling unusually foreign.  I wish I'd grabbed a video for myself though, because the 325X2 was smooth and authoritative.  I love deadlifting.

Next day, and I'm pretty damn sore from all this.

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: 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.

5/3/1 BBB: In Review

I'm going to keep this short like my time with this program.

First off, all these headings should have BBB in quotes, or I should have called it 5/3/1 +5X10 or something, because with the exception of Cycle 2 of Squats, I didn't use the main movement for the 5X10 sets, but rather a variant except in the case of Cycle 2 of Deadlifts where I did hypers for 5 sets of 10-20.  Not really the program right?  So this is very much In Review of what I did as opposed to A Review of Boring But Big.

All I really have to say is that my pressing moved the needle a little bit more than my Squat, and that Squat in particular started to leave me feeling pretty beat up.  Deadlift continued it's usual steady increase for the most part.  I haven't done a Wendler style deload or layoff since I started 5/3/1 Full Body back in July.  I had some lower rep sessions while on vacation, but they were still real work sessions.  I imagine this has a lot to do with the beat up feeling.

All of this, combined with one other element made me decide to cut this a little short.  I was only going to do one more cycle of this program anyway, so it's not a complete bail out.  The other element is that Paul Carter finally release his LRB 365 manual this week, and I'd been planning on running that for the entirety of 2013.  With the way my training was starting to go, I looked at the calendar and saw no reason to wait.  I've jumped straight into that program with no layoff either, because I've set very conservative goals, and the first 3 weeks are very light.  See you over there.

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

BW - 201

Hypers - 5 sets of 15-20

Squats -
BarX5
95X5
135X5
185X5
210X3
235X1

Pendlays -
BarX10
95X5
115X3
135X3
125X15

Dips - BWX7, 9, 12, 9, 7

Chiro Crunches - 5 sets of 25-35

Continue to like the hypers over the reverse hypers for now.  Interestingly, in the first few sets I feel the muscles really getting worked, and then for the last few, they just feel warm and "capable" for lack of a better word.

Squats actually went pretty well, and I possibly could have gotten another rep or two at the end, but I'm lowering my training max after this without a deload, so I didn't want to grind this out beforehand.

Tried something a little different with the Rows, and that was going back to something I did on Paul Carter's UB - Reps Strength program where I over warmed-up on rows and then did my rep-out set as a back-off.  Went great, and 125X15 is a Rep PR and projected 1RM increase.

For dips, rather than try to push a new projected 1RM, I went back to the ladder I ran 2 weeks ago, and tried to run it with 2 more reps per set in order to push the overall volume for the session up.  This worked very well, as I got all the reps on each set, but the last reps on the last two sets were all out efforts.

New diet starts on Sunday.  I broke it out into a table for myself yesterday, and will do the grocery shopping for the first week soon.  This will take a lot of pre-planning and vigilance to pull off over the next 2 months, and I'm excited about it.

5/3/1 Log: Cycle 1. Week 0. Pressing

Defranco's Simple-6

Press - 45X10, 65X5, 75X3, 85X3, 100X9
super-set with
Chin-ups - BWX5X5

Chin-ups - BWX5, 5, 3, 5, 4
super-set with
BB Overhead Extensions - BarX10, 65X6, BarX10

Push-Ups - X20, 15, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3

Hammer and Tire - 3 rounds of 20 "each arm", 60 second rests

So I'm starting 5/3/1!  Very excited.  However, testing my DL 1RM this last week really took it out of me, and I was a little nervous that I wasn't allowing enough downtime between ending one program and starting another, so I added what I'm calling "Week 0" to the program.

Week 0 is basically a deload before the program week.  For my regular 5/3/1 deloads, I'm using the updated %'s that Jim posted on his blog.  The thing I noticed when I started plugging these into my spreadsheet is that these numbers (using the MROUND function in Excel) are the same as those in the 5X week at the beginning of the following cycle. The effect is 5/3/1/3, which makes sense because a lot of people reverse the 5 and 3 weeks as a variation on the program.  This incorporates that into the deload week, you just don't go for reps on the last set.  I decided to give myself a week to ease into the program by doing 3X's at the same weight I'll start my 5X's.  Also gives me a chance to make tweaks to assistance work, and get used to the way this program "feels" in the gym.

With that being said, the presses felt good so I decided to go for reps on my last set!  Ha.  I think I was within the philosophical boundaries of the program to do so.  The 100X9 was probably the most I could have done, and that projects to be around my 9RM so fine.

BLAB Log: Week 10.Day 2-3

Day 2:
Agile-8
Kneeling Jump - BWX6X2
Pause Squats - 45X5, 95X5, 105X5, 125X5
Stability Ball Leg-Curls - BWX10X2
super-set with
Feet-Elevated Plank - BWX30sec.X2

Day 3:
Simple-6
Chin-up - BWX4
Pulldowns - 90X10
super-set with
Seated Side-Laterals - 15sX10,. 25sX10
Blackburns - 5sX15sec. each position
Cable Bicep Coorls - 30X12, 40X12
Core Circuit - BWX2

Last of the De-Load days.  Decided to pause the squats.  I did this some on the last deload, and decided to go all the way with it this time.  Couple of things learned:  I've never really worried about my depth, I just go until I feel a tight stretch at the bottom before reversing.  I know I got lower with the pauses though.  Not sure what the take away is, but I do know there's more depth there if I want it in the future.  Also, the pausing really made it easy to execute form on the ascent.  Without the rapid change in direction, it's very natural to drive through the heel and let the knees track back along the correct path.  I like pause squats.
The planks were supposed to be on a ball, but I just don't trust the ball at the gym to support my weight with my feet elevated.  I tried it, but it started to go alarmingly flat, so I bailed.  I think my training will survive.
I walked home from the gym for my steady-state.  I usually do this anyway, btw.
I don't know if there's any take away from the the Chin day.  Oh, I did under-hand V-grip instead of overhand.  Not better, just different.

BLAB Log: Week 10.Day 1

Simple-6

De-Load Week

BB Bench - BarX5, 75X5, 95X5

Push-ups - BWX20X2
super-set with
Neutral-grip Cable Rows - 60X20X2

Bicep "21s" (7 reps each: Zottman Curls, Curls, Hammer Curls) - 25sX1 set

Defranco's "BeZercher" complex - 45X8

De-Load week so not a lot to talk about.  While I haven't studied up on Dynamic/Speed work, I did try to execute the Bench as quickly as possible.  Meaning I set-up like I would for a normal work-set, and attempted to execute the movement with correct form (tucking hard near the bottom, attempting a clean bar-path,etc.), but otherwise I was focused on moving the bar as quickly as possible.  I believe this volume is actually quite low for speed work, but nonetheless it gave me something to focus on.  Also, my impression of speed-work is that the impulse to move the bar quickly is intended to carry-over to maximal work, so the practice can't hurt.

The first round of 20 push-ups was easy, the 2nd round had 2 or 3 pauses in it.  Can't tell if that's progress or not. 

For the Zercher complex, and without thinking about it, I did split squats instead of lunges.  Significantly easier, but still a challenge.  I'll tuck that away for the future in case I feel the need to do some "lighter" single leg work.

BLAB Log: Week 5.Day 2

Agile-8

DB Squat jumps - 20X6X2

Squats -  105X5, 125X5

Back extensions - BWX10
super-set with
Plate twists - 25X10X2

Day 2 of the deload week went fine.  I decided to pause at the bottom of all my squat warm-ups and my first work set.  I suspect that's why my legs were very tired by late the following afternoon, but no biggie.

I also did mixed grip chin sets between most of the programmed sets.  Neutral close grip seems to be the easiest, so I will focus on that going forward.  I also finished with 25 non-stop push-ups to try to work on my rep strength in that movement.  25 was my target, but it eas probably my limit.  RPE was at 10.  One more easy day to go before 15 real work sessions.

BLAB Log: Week 5.Day 1

Simple-6

Barbell Bench Press 45.0x10,65.0x7,80.0x5,95.0x5 Dumbbell Bench Press 100.0x15,110.0x15 Cable Seated Row 90.0x15,100.0x15 Dumbbell Shoulder Shrug 120.0x10,140.0x10 Barbell Complex 45.0x8
Deload Week.  Everything was fine.  I went heavy on the accessory movements and hit PRs on DB bench.  I also added in chins between almost every set in the hopes to get those up.  Neutral close-grip seems promising.  I also added 20 push-ups at the end.  I will continue to do chins between sets this week, and try to add 5 push-ups to the extra "finishing" set every session, as well.