I am serious about wanting to qualify and compete at powerlifting, but when I started out on this series there were a few key problems:
- I spent most of 2008 and 2009 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.
- My hip mobility is dreadful so I can’t squat deep enough and it hinders how much I can deadlift.
- 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.
This series
Having had some reasonable successes at the end of 2009, 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.
This week
This was the fifth week in the program and was scheduled to be a rest week. Historically, rest weeks have taken the form of doing my usual bench workout on Saturday and Deadlift workout on Sunday but then taking 5 days of complete rest. No weights, no cardio. Instead I aim to do a minimum of 30 minutes rolling, stretching and other mobility work each evening, take a long hot bath, chill with a book and have some early nights and extra good quality sleep.
To compound it all, I was still staying away on business for more than half of this week, which had a few benefits but also a few disadvantages.
- I didn’t have to cook and there were no chores to do, so I could really get the mobility work in with no excuses.
- I was in the middle of a high stress piece of work so it was difficult to leave it behind when I got to my hotel room each evening, which impacted on general relaxation.
- Other than wi-fi there was nothing to do in my hotel room so having a bath and then going to bed became very attractive as an option each evening.
- I was on my own so I had nobody to brainstorm ideas with each evening (other than brief phone conversations with Chris).
The bench workout
This was bad. It’s worth remembering that I came into my Saturday workout having been staying away from home on business for a couple of nights, not having slept particularly well for the end of the week, having done several sessions of dumbbell snatches for cardio (which tires out the shoulder joint a bit) and I’d got to the end of 4 weeks of cutting and was starting to tire out anyway.
Getting under the bar to do my bench on Saturday afternoon I just couldn’t get comfortable. My shoulders and elbows were drifting and I was struggling to get the weight off the rack to start out (which tired me out before I began).
Our rack has horizontal pins with a lip at the end. In order to do bench press you have to unrack the bar by lifting it over the pins at a non-optimal strength point (the bar has to be further up your chest than it would be for benching, otherwise you would hit the pins on every rep). I have always found this to be the hardest part of benching, since it requires more shoulder strength than any other part of the movement, and with tired out shoulder joints I was not well placed toget it right.
I completed my reps but had a few false starts when I couldn’t get the bar off the rack and my form was poor with my elbows drifting out to the sides.
The deadlift workout
Sunday morning was the scene of a long debate. To accept Saturday as a sign that I should start the rest period sooner (since I would take a few days to fully recover from any deadlifting) or to see if, after the longer and better night of sleep I had on Saturday night, I could do this as planned.
In the end the idea of doing deadlifts was abandoned, but since we were planning some changes to the program for the next month and this was going to include some new exercises for me I instead spent an enjoyable hour in the gym testing my squat depth (which I then reported on last week) and trying out the new exercises.
It turned out that my pull up strength has progressed so far that I could happily play about on the bar trying all the different variants with ease. A big change from a few months ago when that would have still been unheard of for me!
What to do going forward?
These rest weeks are also an opportunity to re-write the program. I seem to get best results if I change my program with relative frequency, and I’ve certainly been seeing problems with some of the exercises that I’ve been doing for longer (eg. push press).
I was given a copy of the Westside for Skinny Bastards program a year ago and keep reading it, toying with it briefly, and then abandoning it again. However, I’ve had some massive improvements in work capacity and strength in the last year so this seems a good time to try it out again.
I will maintain the four workouts style with two main exercises and two assistance exercises included within that (so you can already see that some Westside elements were already in the existing program), but rather than blending a mix of upper and lower body at each workout (main exercises with one and the assistance exercises with the other) I’m going to do fully upper or lower body workouts doing a max effort for one and repetition (higher reps, lighter weight) for the other workout.
Lower body: max effort exercises will be a squat variant (probably zercher or raised reverse leg split squat) and RDLs. Deadlift (for which I’ll continue with the cluster/singles sumo/standard rotation) will be treated as my main repetition exercise.
Upper body: max effort exercises will be bench press and one of the chin up or pull up variants. For repetition day I’ll do another couple of chin and press variants.
Assistance exercises will include bent over rows, viking presses, hip thrusts, hanging knee raises, dragon flags, incline bench press etc.
We’ll see how it goes! If you’ve got any suggestions based on what you’ve seen so far, please let me know.
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