Post holiday it has been tough trying to get myself to start working out again. Work doesn’t help either.
Following the late night arrival from holiday, I elected to skip out my Sunday workout last weekend. I was a physical and mental mess. Unfortunately I also knew that I’d be away with work on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights (staying in a hotel with no gym), so I thought I might get two workouts in on the remaining Monday and Tuesday nights.
The best-laid plans always go wrong.
Chris has been horribly sick all week, starting sometimes on Monday, so the couple of hours of my Monday night that weren’t spent in the office were instead spent driving about trying to find suitable medicines from shelves that were bare of electrolyte solutions.
With my one remaining workout opportunity on Tuesday I decided that getting dug in to some heavy work wasn’t going to be the most optimal use for my time. There would be no chance to cement it back in with a follow up workout. Instead I decided to use my lone Tuesday “workout” window to see if I am now able to fix the remaining issue with my deadlift and squats.
What was the problem with my max efforts?
You’d think I’d be happy with my max effort lifts the week before I went on holiday. I was happy with them but there was still one crucial problem with a couple of the lifts.
If I want to compete then my squats need to get to parallel – I was still squatting to an inch or two above parallel. Similarly, if I want to compete, I need to pick up the weight from the floor for my deadlift – at the moment the weight stands on inch-high plates.
In both cases I hadn’t had the hip mobility to use the lower positions when I last tested my form and depth.
While I was away, I had given some serious consideration to banking my lifts where they’ve got to and seeing if I now had sufficient hip and thoracic mobility to drop my deadlift and squat the extra inch or two. If I could manage the new depths I fully expected that I would need to also drop the weight slightly, so I planned to test the new depth, drop the weight slightly and then build up the weight at the new depths.
I was concerned that I might build the lifts up too far, then fix the depth problems and get depressed by how much I might need to drop the weight.
Squat
I started with my squat on Tuesday, using a crazily light weight and videoing myself to see how it looked (since Chris was too ill to ask him to stand there watching).
I was pleased to find that I could now squat to the box, rather than the small stool I’ve been using (though this is still the larger of our plyometric boxes). I think this now gets me close enough to parallel for competition purposes.
Once I was happy with the form I decided to add on weight to see where I could get to, bearing in mind that I was previously doing ten sets of three reps using 70kg and had a 1RM of 80+ kg (and also considering that by this time I’d done quite a few reps with the practice weight).
At 50kg I was still pleased with the form and the speed of the squats:
At 55kg I was starting to have to grind out of the hole:
Next week, I’m going to start at 55kg and then see if I can quickly add the 15kg to get back to where I was, but this time squatting to a new depth.
Deadlift
I was pretty tired after all the squatting and wandering round the gym so I didn’t get as far in seeing what weight I could pull without too much difficulty. However, I was pleased to find that I could at least get the bar off the floor now without my form collapsing round me.
What I did find interesting was quite how far back my bum is to keep my back straight and my shoulders in the right place in relation to the bar. The joys of long femurs. I think Chris was pretty surprised too, when I showed him the clip below:
This was only bodyweight and I definitely found it tough getting it off the floor. It didn’t feel heavy, just awkward. I think I may have to start really light on this (maybe 55kg or 60kg?) and hope that, once I get used to the feel of the lower bar, I can start to put the weight up quite quickly again.
Conclusions
I’m pleased that I’ve nailed the new depths. It was particularly interesting when uploading the videos to You Tube to look back over the other videos in the channel and see how my depth has improved since my wobbly squat with almost no weight to a depth that was nowhere near parallel, through the stool phase and now at this new deeper squat.
I’m also glad I stopped putting the weight up and tried this when I did, given how much I’ve had to knock off the weight to achieve the new depths!
I’m looking forward to trying out my workouts with these new weights and depths and will make sure I report on my progress once I finally get a chance to get back into the gym and training hard.
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