This is why I love “week 3″… setting personal records is satisfying. 🙂

“Week 3”

• 5/3/1 – Bench Press (working max: 195#)
  • 2x5x45 (warmup)
  • 1x5x80
  • 1x5x100
  • 1x3x120
  • 1x5x150 (work)
  • 1x3x170
  • 1x6x190 (PR)
• Asst. #1 – Bench Press
  • 5 x 10 x 105
• Asst. #2 – Dumbbell Rows
  • 5 x 10 x 40
• Metcon – jump rope
  • 1 Tabata set – all single hop

It’s very satisfying to set goals then meet them. To see continued progress. To do more than you ever have before, more than you thought you ever could. Bench pressing 1x6x190 isn’t monumental (given the all time world record for a raw bench press for someone around my weight is 600 lbs. or so), but it’s good for me. It’s also kinda neat to think that in 2 cycles I’ll be breaking the 200# mark as a work weight (I could break 200 now if I wanted to, but not for work weight).

I continue to bump my bench assistance weight up by 5#, doing 105 this workout, and still that doesn’t feel like enough weight to really work me, so it’s up to 110# next week. I recently watched Dave Tate’s “So You Think You Can Bench” series again and really worked on some finer points. I’m thinking during next week’s deload week that I might fiddle with my grip width, as Dave talks about elbows going too far below the bench pad, and that a potentially wider grip could be nicer on my shoulder. I’ll experiment and see.

On the rows, last session I noticed I wasn’t caring about the negative that much, almost “dropping” the weight back down. Today I made sure to give as much thought to going down as I did going up. A cool side-effect is I found myself more focused on pulling the shoulder back, not just moving the weight…. ensuring the back muscles were doing the work, not the arm. Made a nice difference.

And what’s there to say about rope jumping… 🙂

I toy with jumping 10# for this next cycle, but I think that’s merely my ego wanting to get to 200# faster. Today’s work set of 6 reps was a hard push… on rep 4 I wasn’t sure I’d make rep 5, and on rep 5 I really wasn’t sure about making rep 6, and on rep 6 I felt like the bar in fact will be on my throat if I try for 7 so I did stop (form was failing, left arm peeding out). I perhaps could make a 10# jump, but I do think that’s driven more by ego and well… like Henry Rollins said, 200# is 200# and I don’t need her to teach me a harsh lesson. Better lesson learned to keep things in check and go for the long run.