What’s swirling in my head about where I’ve been and where I’m going.

If you’ve read what I’ve been writing lately, there are things going on in my life affecting my health and my perspective. It’s minorly physical health, mostly mental and emotional health. I continue to grow weary of negativity, of poor perspective. I’m trying to improve some of this for myself, and also culling things from my life that are unappealing, or don’t otherwise aid in growth.

So with that, I think it’s time for a deload. I really don’t want to take one because well… it’s deloading. It’s rarely fun. 🙂  But I think I need it so I don’t get myself to a point where I am forced to take one because something goes too far. Taking a chance to impose some recovery is just how it will have to be. In fact, I wondered if this might be a “Jack shit” deload, and I just sleep a lot, foam roll, stretch, eat protein and fat and minimize carbs the whole time, maybe do some bodyweight work, but basically do nothing else for a week and see how my body takes it.

I keep flipping through 2 books: Wendler’s latest, “Beyond 5/3/1“; and Brandon Lily’s “The Cube Method“. I found myself already doing some of the things Wendler put into the Beyond book, which stands to reason as the book is somewhat a collection of things that he’s already put out over the past year or two. But it’s also got a lot of new things in there. Joker Sets are a good example, and I think I can find a place for them. Because you see, I keep thinking about how Cube requires a (mock) meet at the end of the cycle to retest your 1RM’s and set up for the next cycle. It’s a slight problem for me because I don’t quite have the means for proper 1RM testing. I don’t have training partners, and while the gym equipment is good for most “fitness” needs, it doesn’t quite serve my heavier lifting needs. If I had a real power rack I’d be fine. If I could, I could put safety pins at the bottom of the bench press and also bring up the pins a hair more so dumping the bar during a squat wasn’t quite such a yoga-inducing experience. I have been looking at some ways to maybe make it work, and I think I might get there. But Cube just comes off like if you don’t really know your proper maxes, you may not get the right ends out of the program. But with Joker Sets, I just might find another way to finagle things to help me get closer, given my context.

Of course the flip side is I just start going to Hyde Park Gym because they have all the right equipment, plus strongman stuff. I think I could even use chalk!

But for now, here’s where I remain. I think in some regard I vacillate between wanting to change and wanting to stay the course. It takes time to really know how things are working out, and I cannot deny when I see progress. So if it’s working, do I need to change? And if there’s a need for change or a desire to change, why? Just to be different? or to solve an issue? Gotta examine why I want change.

I think one change I want now is to bring in some sort of dynamic work. It’s not so much wanting to see what things like “dynamic effort” method work can do, tho certainly I’m curious how that would play out since I’ve never done any true DE work. It’s more that all this slow work I think is too slow. 🙂  Here’s an example. When I park my truck, I always engage the parking brake, which is done via a pedal pushed by my left foot. When I push it, I feel some weird achy pain in my knee. But when I started doing work like the farmer’s walks, the elliptical work, that pain went away. I found when I did more with my body than just “slow lifts”, things don’t feel so bad. Remember, my primary reason for this is because I don’t want to become decrepit; it’s about my health and getting around in life, not trying to break world records on the platform. If doing some more dynamic/explosive work can help me out, great! It’s perhaps also why strongman stuff holds some appeal to me, because there’s a lot of practical movement there, not specialized movements of weighted bars, y’know?

Hence, let’s try power cleans. But I must admit, now that I’m trying them I’m not sure they will accomplish what I’m after, so I may drop them after a few more sessions with them. My use of them now will be light and “more”, meaning whereas it’s generally recommended to do things like 5 sets of 3, I might do 5 of 5 or 5 of 8 just to get more reps and more feel for it, especially since I am using light weights. It might be better to do true DE-style work, which then gets me back to where Cube comes in. But Beyond 5/3/1 has a listing that puts some dynamic work in, and that might be interesting to try for a cycle or two.

Anyways, for now I am enjoying some minor changes that simplify things.

I am enjoying going back to a BBB-style template, keeping things simple. Just a couple exercises/movements, hit the basics, be done with it. Adding all the back work in I think is also going to be good for me. I’m still finding the right proportions, but so far so good. I do think supersetting with an exercise that works in the opposing plane is right. So that is, on bench days I bench and row, but superset the bench with pullups. That is, bench and row are both in one plane of movement and pullups are perpendicular (if you will). My shoulders appear to not complain so much when I do this. This also means I can drop some of the additional arm/shoulder/back work, because this should be enough.

The “6 week cycle” I like. That is, you run 1 cycle, skip the deload, bump the weights up, hit another cycle, and 7th week is a deload. Part of the reason I am bummed to deload now is again poking at the Cube. Cube runs for 9 weeks, so how would this pan out for me? Can my body handle 9 weeks? So I wanted to do 3 cycles in a row, but I have to remember that since I only go 3 days a week, whereas a normal 5/3/1 cycle is 4 weeks, mine are 5, so I’ve effectively done 8 weeks. I’m sure I could handle a 9 week Cube cycle since they do lay out differently. So thinking about it now as I write this, well, isn’t so bad now. 🙂

I also think that adding Joker Sets in is good. I’m not sure I can do it regularly. But I think if I make the last sets of my last cycle (before deload) contain Jokers, that would be a lot of fun and quite telling. For now I will plan on them.

As for my fat shedding.

CBL isn’t happening for me. At least, not strictly. I am keeping with a carb-cycling tho. That is, I am keeping CBL-inspired and guided for the most part. But if I need some extra carbs on the weekend to get through because my body is screaming at me? I’ll eat something. I have learned to listen to my body and if it really needs it, I’ll give it. I need to operate on many levels, beyond just lifting. I need to be fully functioning when I’m on the gun range because students count on me and there are safety matters to contend to, so screwing with blood sugar isn’t always a sound thing, y’know? 🙂   I’m seeing very slow progress on the fat loss front because of this, but it at least seems to be happening. So if it takes me many months, fine. If this means I can adopt a protocol that works for me and I can live with for life, great. That’s better than any sort of gimmick diet program, y’know?

So we’ll see how it goes.