Set another PR on bench press.

“Week 2” 3 reps

• 5/3/1 – Bench Pres (working max: 195#)
  • 2x5x45 (warmup)
  • 1x5x80
  • 1x5x100
  • 1x3x120
  • 1x3x140 (work)
  • 1x3x160
  • 1x8x180
• Asst. #1 – Bench Press
  • 5 x 10 x 100
• Asst. #2 – Dumbbell Row
  • 5 x 10 x 40
• Metcon – jump rope
  • 1 Tabata set – all single hop, tho I did also try running in place

To set a personal record (PR) could be a number of things. If you did more reps with the same weight, that’s “more work” and could constitute a PR. If you did more weight (tho of course slightly less reps), that could constitute a PR as well. If you did more reps and more weight, well, that’s pretty clear. 🙂

On my previous 5/3/1 cycle, the PR was 1x10x175 (with a 180# working max). On this cycle, “week 1” had me do 1x11x170, which one could argue was a PR since I’ve never moved 170 for 11 reps. Well today, I did 1x8x180, which I’ll claim as a PR because I’ve NEVER moved 180# in bench press for any reps, and then to crank out 8 reps with it? Yeah, that’s acceptable. 🙂 Of course, the question then is, am I getting stronger? I think so. Makes me still wonder if I’m under-dosed on what my bench press max really should be.

On the assistance bench, I opted to bump to 100 this workout and that still felt fine to me so… 105 next time. Slow hops.

On the rows I realized that I explode the weight up, but then kinda “drop” it down… not really drop, but there’s not much emphasis on the negative. I need to change that and have a little more work on the negative. I focused on that and the 40# of course worked me harder today. I think I’ll continue with 40 and more negative emphasis before I go up to 45. But this is working nicely.

Jumping rope… I don’t know what gives. It’s like I took a step back in coordination. Geez. But I also tried a round or two of the “running in place” type of jumping… wow, that was a big failure. 😉 So I’m not going to even consider it yet as my workload, but I will try to do a little “running in place” rope jumping every time from now on so I can work out the coordination aspect of it all and get it figured out.

Side note: I’m shopping around for life insurance and of course there’s going to be a medical exam. This should be interesting because my height/weight obviously doesn’t fit the charts, but it’s not because I’m an unhealthy lard butt. As well, what’s my pee test going to look like? For instance, the creatine supplementation. My creatine levels aren’t high because I’m unhealthy, they are because I supplement with it. I’ll probably set the medical appointment out a good week or two then just go off the extra sups, drink lots of water, and try to flush my system a bit so things don’t look too out of whack. I’m not wanting to do this for fear of how it might lower performance, but on the same token I’m looking at it that it could be revealing to see just how much of my performance is in fact coming from the supps. So, it should be an interesting thing to observe.