Not the greatest, but a PR nonetheless.

“Week 3”

• “5/3/1” – Press (working max: 145#)
  • 2x5x45 (warmup)
  • 1x5x60
  • 1x5x75
  • 1x3x90
  • 1x5x110 (work)
  • 1x3x125
  • 1x4x140 (PR)
• Asst. #1 – Press
  • 4 x 10 x 70
  • 1 x 11/6/4 x 70 (rest-pause set)
• Asst. #2 – Supinated Close-grip Pulldowns
  • 4 x 10 x 130
  • 1 x 8/4/3 x WT (rest-pause set)
• GPP – Elliptical
  • Tabata style (20 sec. 150-ish strides per min., 10 sec. 100-ish strides per min)
  • 2 min. slow (warmup)
  • 1 tabata set
  • 2 min. slow (cooldown)
• DeFranco Agile 8 – just foam rolling

Today was alright. Not my best, but alright.

My left shoulder still hurts. I woke up at 2:30 AM. Could my lowered calorie intake be in play? My rest times between sets were lower. Could be any number of things. I don’t know. I don’t write this as an excuse, just a record of what was up right now so 6 months from now I can look back and perhaps analyze better.

I wanted to get 5 reps on that PR set, but only got 4 and that 4th saw me leaning back and pushing like hell. Not what I wanted, but it’s still a PR.

One thing I’m wondering about. I’ve noticed with everything that as the weights get heavier, my body is being forced to lift a certain way. For example, if you deadlift an empty bar, you can probably have horrible form and move the bar all over the place. But when you deadlift 300#, the bar is going to have a tendency to do what it wants to do with gravity and other forces of nature instead of you being able to move it all over the place. The heavy weights are forcing a particular way to do things. As I’m pressing these heavier weights, my body is changing how it wants to lift. For instance, with say 95# I can just push it around and no problems. But put that 130+ on there and my body starts to feel it differently. I want to tense up and if I don’t things are harder. I want to push differently in terms of things like the Valsalva maneuver. So perhaps as well, I’m going through a bit of transition now that the weights are actually getting heavier and I just need to roll with it. Since it only happens on the heaviest of weights, I can’t get a lot of “under the bar” time with it, but I need to pay attention and work on it as it comes. We’ll see. Just an observation and thought.

Assistance pressing was fine, but I lowered the rests to maybe 90 seconds at most between sets. I don’t know why, but today I just didn’t want to rest much… get in, press, get out. *shrug* I did NOT do chins between these sets. My left shoulder still isn’t happy and I didn’t feel like making it worse. Even during the pulldowns it wasn’t happy. I worked to keep tension in my shoulder so I wasn’t “pulling it out of socket” at the top of the movement (the “hang”), but that also kept tension in my arms, and so with all this tension it worked me a bit harder and the pulldowns were a little tougher today. No matter. I’d rather not be abusing my shoulder.

Elliptical remains good. Incline of “10”, resistance of “12”, about 100-spm slow and 150-ish fast. Last time I was resting too much on my arms/forearms, today I made an effort not to have so much rest/support. Still had my hands on the little “heart monitor grip” area, a little downward tension, but no resting. I’ll keep at this for a little bit, then jack it up. This is a good spot to start adaptation; it works me.

On the food note… I wonder. I’ve shed a few pounds, been cutting back on caloric intake, all good. But the past couple evenings I’ve been eating a lot of “trail mix” stuff. Nuts, dried fruit, little chocolate-covered things. Not huge, but under normal circumstances I wouldn’t eat it. I wonder if my body was saying “dude, you’re about to do some big lifting, you need some fuel built up”. Dunno. I’m going to be good during the PR week here, but if I need a little, take it. Then once I hit deload week, I’ll scale back again.