Today was good. Read on, if you care.

“Week 1”

• 5 reps – Press (working max: 145#)
  • 2x5x45 (warmup)
  • 1x5x55
  • 1x5x70
  • 1x3x85
  • 1x5x90 (work)
  • 1x5x105
  • 1x9x120
• Asst. #1 – Press
  • 4 x 10 x 70
  • 1 x 10/5/4 x 70 (rest-pause set)
• Asst. #2 – Supinated Close-grip Pulldowns
  • 4 x 10 x 130
  • 1 x 10/4/3 x 130 (rest-pause set)
• GPP – Sprints
  • Tabata style (20 sec. sprint, 10 sec. walk)
  • 2 “laps” walking (warmup)
  • 8 “reps” (8 reps is one Tabata set)
  • 2 “laps” walking (cooldown)
• DeFranco Agile 8

Today was good! I’m glad I took all of last week off as a “deload” week. My body thanks me for it. I felt good and eager to get back to the gym.

This begins my fifth cycle on the Wendler 5/3/1 program. I’m making some changes to the program, as I refine my goals and see what needs additional help and work. I’m moving away from the “Boring But Big” template and more to the “Triumvirate”. I’m still wanting to build strength (and muscle mass), but seeing where things need some help and trying to work to address those issues. Because of this, this cycle may not be “straight productive” as there will be some experimenting and changing around. But that’s all good. Need to continue to find what works for me and what I need. I’ll talk about the changes for each day as I go through “week 1” here. But know that in general I’m trying to address shortcomings and weaknesses, and trying to just work to be awesome. 🙂

On Press. First thing I realized is that I screwed up on weights. In my Excel spreadsheet where I do my calculations and tracking, I forgot to bump the “work max” from last cycle so I used the same “week 1” weights as the prior cycle. Oh well, I still cranked out 9 reps with 120, which is more than I did last time. Plus I did it with a LOT less rest between sets. So yeah, strength went up. I’m fine with that. I fixed the spreadsheet and will resume proper weights next workout.

One thing that happened while pressing? The weight is of course getting heavier, and I found at one point while working to get it overhead I clenched my butt and that helped to get the weight up. I didn’t plan on it, just happened, but I remembered reading somewhere recently that yes, you should be explicitly clenching your butt and using the whole body in the press. So I’m going to be working to ensure I get more full-body involvement like that on all my press sets.

I’m still doing pressing as the first assistance exercise, because it’s just good towards helping me get stronger and building some mass, some volume for my shoulders and triceps. All good. I did properly bump the weight here to 70 (from 65 last cycle). You can see tho that I added a modification at the end of the set: “rest pause”. What is rest-pause? Rest-pause is something from DoggCrapp Training. Here’s an explanation from Wendler’s 5/3/1 book, second edition:

A lifter will perform a movement, let’s use the press as an example, and perform an all-out set at a given weight. After this all out set, he will take 10-15 breaths and perform the press again with the same weight, obviously for less reps, to failure. He will rack the bar, take another 10-15 breaths and do another set to failure. So a rest/pause set would look like this:

Press – 155×10 reps, 10-15 breaths, 4 reps, 10-15 breaths, 2 reps

To make it easy: do one set for as many reps as you can, take short break, do the same weight to failure, take another rest and do one more set to failure. After the first set, your reps will diminish greatly so don’t be alarmed. You may only get 2-3 reps on the final set.

I’m curious to try it. DoggCrapp has a lot of good things about it, and I’m curious to try rest-pause to see what it might do for me. Note that I’m not doing DC-style training, merely taking the notion of rest-pause and applying it to the last set of my assistance work. So… why?

Well, when I was thinking about how to plan out this cycle, I realized that yes, I’d like to get some more attention to my arms. I didn’t really want to do curls and pressdowns and the like. Frankly, I think my triceps get a lot of work from all the pressing I do (13 sets of press, 13 sets of bench press, 26 sets in a week). But my biceps get about 10 sets from back work. And in fact, I don’t think I’m getting enough back work either, but I don’t think that’s truly a problem given the exercises I’m doing. And honestly, my arms are fine compared to the rest of my body… I just felt like I wanted to stress them a little more. But I didn’t really want to do curls for them.

Furthermore, I am wanting to move away from pulldowns and do chin/pull-ups. Why am I not doing them? Because I can’t do them. I’ve been working all this time towards building the strength I need to be able to do them. I’m not strong enough, I weigh too much, and put it together and it doesn’t happen. But I want to do them, I’d prefer to do them, they are more awesome than pulldowns. All the work I have been doing has been towards building up the strength to do them. But of course, if I end up doing them, at least for now, will I get enough back volume? Probably not, since I can’t crank out a large number of them.

So it’s my thinking to try rest-pause as a way to jack up the intensity some and see what it can do for me.

On that note then… pulldowns. So I am wanting to get away from pulldowns and work on doing chins. To that end, I opted to go from 5x10x120 to something like 5x8x130 with the last set being rest-pause (dropping to 120 if I needed to in order to get a good rest-pause set out). The intent is to focus on strength so I can do chins… kinda working my way down to perhaps a 5×5 set, with again the last set being rest-pause (using less weight if needed to get more volume). Well, get this….

I admit my ego here… I don’t feel like struggling to fail to do one chin-up, so I haven’t tried one in a while — too many eyes. I know they won’t care, but it’s just in my head. Sue me for being human. Well, today the gym was dead save for me and the gym owner. As I got towards the end of my pressing assistance work, he walked off the floor. I said why not. I grabbed the chin-up bar, put myself in a dead hang (tho knees bent, feet behind me because there’s just not enough clearance otherwise), and pulled up. Holy shit! I did one! Well, almost. I had to reach my chin up to clear the bar, but I did it! I personally want to say “1 chin up” is pulling myself above the bar, no chin-reaching, bar is even with my clavicles. So I’m not quite there, but I’m further than I was before! Huzzah! In fact, after I did my last set of presses, I did another chin. Same results. Whee!

Then when I hit the pulldowns, the 130 felt well… good. So I ended up doing 5×10 across with the last set rest-pause. If I really wanted 8 reps I probably would need to use 140. But, I’m not going to mess with it. Here’s what I’m going to do. Wendler recommends you do chin-ups between every pressing set. And so, I’m going to try that. I will start off doing it only between my assistance pressing sets (not the 5/3/1 sets). I will do a set of presses, then I will do 1 chin-up, getting up as high as I can and then doing a slow negative. Just 1, enough for now. If I get to a point where I can’t get high enough on the chin, then I’ll jump up and slow-negative it. Just 1 between each assistance pressing set. Then do pulldowns as normal. Once things are working well here, move to 2 reps, and so on. Let’s see where this takes me!

And the thing is, doing that will add more work for my back and arms, which is what I’m wanting. And so, everything is working out. I’m thrilled.

Next came sprints.

I’ve been trying to work myself up… 4 reps, 5 reps, and this was supposed to be 6 reps. But you know what? I find that when I get to 4 reps, that’s when I start to feel worked… by 5, that’s good and starting to kick in. So I’ve been feeling that gee, I really need to just buckle down and crank out the whole 8 reps. Another benefit? If in fact this is going to help my fat loss (coupled with more work to my diet) then well… the lighter I get, the more chinups I can do, right? 🙂 Yes, I’m going to use it as a motivator for chins. Why not?

Trouble is, sprinting is growing hard on me. Perhaps in part because of my weight, probably because I’m running on concrete (despite having some really good running shoes). But my right knee is hating me and I’m honestly afraid of what may happen.

So I’m going to have to look into what else I can do for GPP, Tabata style, that isn’t going to be so killer to my knee. I don’t want to risk a knee injury that could screw me for life, or even set me back in my deadlifting and squatting, y’know? It’s not worth it.

But still… went ahead for all 8 reps today and boy, it hurt. 🙂 Good hurt tho. Had to really convince myself to keep going because after rep 6 I wanted to stop and after rep 7 I said to myself “the faster you run, the faster it’ll be over”. I did not want to do it, but I know… you have to. It’s the only way to get better, to push yourself, to push beyond your limits, to do what is uncomfortable.