Not Just a Man's World

I am serious about wanting to qualify and compete at powerlifting, but at the moment there are a few key problems:

1. I’ve just spent the last two years trying to improve my form and find the weaknesses that were being masked by poor form (like my abs) and working hard at eliminating weaknesses.  I’m not there yet, but I’m definitely moving in the right direction.  However, the flip side of that is that I’ve not done any proper powerlifting moves for a while and my good form weights are below qualifying weights.
2. My hip mobility is dreadful so I can’t squat deep enough and it hinders how much I can deadlift.
3. When I bench, I can’t stabilise the bar once there’s a mildly heavy weight on it and I tend to fail about halfway up.

17.5 inch squat depth at the start of this program

This series 

This week has been the end of the second week of a new program designed to see me through into the New Year.  Fixing the problems while also driving up the strength numbers are the priorities of the program.  I’m recording my progress in this series: powerlifting progress.  It is serving as a journal and makes me a bit more accountable to my goals.

Here is where I’ve got to this week with my progress.

Squat

Action plan

• Maintain – leg strength and ab strength
• Develop – hip mobility and lower back strength

Progress this week

• I’ve been working on my squat form and depth with an empty bar at the start of each workout, as well as rolling my hip flexors and legs every morning.  I’ve managed to remove one of the foam blocks from the box so that my squat depth has gone down 2 inches to 15.5 inches before I start to tuck. 
• I’ve also learned that there is no point in doing the empty bar squat practice if nobody is watching.  I started my workout on my own one day and thought I was doing good work stretching my hips out behind me and not tucking – Chris came in and told me I was tucking at a higher point then usual.  Learning point: I have insufficient awareness of what my body is doing.
• Close scrutiny of my squat movement suggests my spinal erectors are too tight and are therefore driving the movement.  I’m going to spend the next week researching what stretches or other activity I can do to stretch them out.
• I’ve not done anything about the lower back strength yet.  Again, I need to spend some of the coming week researching what I can do for this, alongside loosening up my spinal erectors.
• Leg strength progresses and I put the weight up and completed 10 sets of 3 reps on 42.5kg for my rear-foot-elevated split squats.  The noises coming out of the garage while I got myself through the later reps probably sounded to the neighbours like someone was giving birth…  I don’t think the weight will be going up every week for much longer.

Bench

Action plan

• Maintain – technique
• Develop – lat and shoulder strength

 Progress this week

• It’s been a dreadful week for my arms and upper back.  Stress at work has resulted in complete locking out of my upper back so that I started to fail and dump the bar on my push presses.  Having looked like I was on target to hit 40kg by Christmas I suddenly found overnight that my reps were going down and I couldn’t even complete the workout with a weight I completed the week before.  I need to significantly increase the upper back work in my mobility drills to try and resolve the issue.
• As a result of some unfortunate incidents dropping the bar on the push presses (because of the upper back problems) I’ve suddenly gone from a sense of being able to conquer the weight to a fear of the weight.  This means I’ve lost my groove and the bar path is going wrong.  I’m going to have to drop down to 30kg and work on building up my confidence again before increasing the weight again.
• Having my upper back locked out has also impacted on my pull ups.  I had to drop my main workout down to single reps with a few double reps at the start, but my form was definitely poor and trap dominant on the doubles.

Overall this week I’ve found my progress on my arms has been upsetting and slightly depressing.

Deadlift

Action plan

• Maintain – leg strength and ab strength
• Develop – hip mobility and lower back strength

Progress this week

• The deadlift happens at the start of the week so I haven’t yet seen whether all the work on my hip mobility for my squat depth is enough to carry across to my deadlift and get it off the slight two inch elevation that I use.  More on this next week.
• Having dropped my reps from 3 to 2 for 10 sets I did successfully complete all 10 sets at 80kg without my lower back collapsing on me, so this suggests my lower back was struggling with the endurance of 3 reps rather than not having the strength at all.
• Dragon flags have moved up a gear as I added and increased the weight on them to 2.5kg this week.  I’m going to hold the weight at 2.5kg for next week until I can do all my reps with straight legs.

Related posts:

1. Powerlifting progress 2011: week thirty-two
2. Powerlifting progress 2011: week thirty
3. Powerlifting progress 2011: week thirty-one
4. Powerlifting progress 2011: week forty-five