I am serious about wanting to qualify and compete at powerlifting. When I started out on this series there were several key problems, such as poor hip mobility. Having had some reasonable successes at the end of 2009, fixing the remaining problems while also driving up the strength numbers are now 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
After last week, we set out to take it easy this week, despite being away on holiday next week. So, instead of doing full workouts, we aimed to just do the main workout exercise for each workout. We also intended completely missing our last workout (lower body max effort) to ensure we would be in best form for six long days of trekking in the Lake District with a few nights out under the stars. You need to be in good physical form to start out on something like that, not exhausted to the core.
I then came down with flu on Monday so I ended up also missing my upper body reps workout. The most important thing was to be sure I was fully recovered and in full strength before leaving for the Lake District on Friday night.
Going forward
Chris is moving from a bulking phase to a cutting phase and with that my workouts will need to change slightly. We arrange our workouts to mirror each other so that we can conveniently workout together in our tiny garage and we’d both like to move to doing some outdoor Strongman-type exercising with the increased daylight hours.
I’ve been doing high volume work for several months now. I’ve successfully developed a much higher work capacity but it would be good to give my body a rest from that now and do some really low rep, low sets work.
With that in mind, here’s how I got on during my final (light) week of the current Westside approach.
Squat
Action plan
- Maintain – leg strength and ab strength
- Develop – hip mobility and lower back strength
Progress this week
As I mentioned before, I didn’t do my lower body max effort workout, so there were no squats. However, I did have a bit of fun trying some bent leg raises to see how I was progressing with my ab strength after hitting 5kg with my hanging knee raises last week.
I still didn’t manage to get my legs vertical, but I could get well past horizontal. I’ll need to keep working on my strength using hanging knee raises, but once I can do a bent leg raise I will have several new bodyweight exercises at my disposal which will be of use to me for training when I am on trips away.
Bench
Action plan
- Maintain – technique
- Develop – lat and shoulder strength
Progress this week
Chris tells me I saw good progress. I didn’t feel like I did. I did 3 reps on 38kg last time and this week I squeezed out 4 reps. Hardly an astounding improvement for two weeks of Viking presses.
On the plus side, the quality of my 4 reps was much higher, but on the other side of the fence, I would have liked to hit 40kg before I went on holiday.
I’ve decided that, for the sake of my sanity, it’s time to give bench a complete rest and focus on maxing on supplementary exercises. Last time I did that I gained 10kg between attempts at bench (about 6 months apart). It’s probably about the same rate of improvement as I’m seeing getting one rep a week on my bench, but it feels less frustrating in the process.
Deadlift
Action plan
- Maintain – leg strength and ab strength
- Develop – hip mobility and lower back strength
Progress this week
I was really pleased with my deadlift clusters this week. I put them up 5kg on the previous week and I found that, with a tired back from having been for a long walk on snow the day before, I was dropping my hips further to allow my glutes to drive the movement, rather than using my back.
A good sign that my hip mobility is really starting to carry across to the right exercises.
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