Lots of deadlifting lets you know just what muscles are truly involved in the motion. 🙂

• 5/3/1 – Deadlift (training max 265#)

• Warmup

• 1x5x105
• 1x5x135
• 1x3x160

Work

• 1x5x175
• 1x5x200
• 1x7x230

Asst. #1 – Deadlift

• 5x10x95

Asst. #2 – Hanging leg raises

• 5x5xbw

Jump rope – 1 Tabita set.

Commentary

The nice thing about tracking in a spreadsheet is it’s easy to enter data and run some statistics. Today’s deadlift workset volume was 3485. The perspective? My last deadlift workout on the Practical Programming Novice program (last week), had a work set volume of 120 and a total (including warmups) volume of 2970. So my volume of deadlifting today was WAY higher than I’ve ever done… and that’s just the workset. Add in the warmup, then the 5 sets of deadlifting as assistance work and wow… that’s a lot of deadlifting. Yes, you become very aware of just what muscles are involved in deadlifting. 🙂

Note that my warmup didn’t start like other routines, with an empty bar. There’s no point in that with the deadlift given I need the bar off the ground to get started. Note as well that I did only 7 reps on the last work set. I felt I could have done more, certainly 8 and maybe 9, but I remembered how things went on Monday’s Press workout… just how humbling the assistance sets can be. I knew this deadlift routine was going to be massively more volume than before, so I felt better to be conservative and not push myself too hard.

On the hanging leg raises, Wendler wants you to do them with straight legs so your feet end up over the bar, like this. I can’t do that, not without a LOT of cheating and that’d just defeat the purpose, even if I could do it with the cheating. So instead, I’m doing it with bent knees, rolling my body up to get my knees to touch my shoulders, like this. But even then, I could only get up so far. If my head/arms were at 12 o’clock, my legs down at 6, and my eyes looking forward to 3, then my knees generally only got to the 2 o’clock point *sigh*. Well, that’s why I’m in the gym… to acknowledge my weaknesses and to get stronger, right? 🙂  Put the ego in the back seat and just do it… that’s the only way to get better. I’m trying to be strict, but I fear I may not overcome my sticking point that way… if the top portion is weak, it needs to be worked, and on bodyweight exercises how else can you do it? So… I’m going to add a slight kip, not so much that momentum moves me through it, but just enough to try to overcome the sticking point so my muscles have to get active and involved… plus if it puts me over the line, then even if my muscles don’t get the concentric benefit as much due to the kip, at least a larger range of motion will get the eccentric. I’ll stick with 5×5 on these until I can do them no sweat…. build up the strength.

On the rope jumping, suddenly I was more coordinated today! I didn’t make it all the way to the end without a stumble, but I probably stumbled about 50% less than I have been. That’s great! I’m just working to take it slow and easy to get the coordination down (get about 25-ish hops per 20 second period)… that slow is smooth, smooth is fast thing, right?

I realize that I really do like deadlifting. But that said… after all this volume today? I suspect I’m going to be mighty sore tomorrow. 🙂