Ooopf.

Wendler 5/3/1 program, cycle 23, week 2

• Work Set – Deadlift (working max: 380#)
  • 1x5x155 (warmup)
  • 1x5x190
  • 1x3x230
  • 1x3x270 (work)
  • 1x3x310
  • 1x5x345
• Assistance – Deficit Deadlift (1.5″ deficit)
  • 5 x 8/6/6/6/6 x 195
• Assistance – Farmer’s walk
  • 3 50yd trips, 45# plate in each hand
• Foam Rolling

I continue to emphasize breaking off the floor with leg drive. It has to be legs pushing, not back lifting. And oh, it kicks my ass. 🙂 And lifting without a belt (save for the heaviest set) really helps you focus more on getting things right, tight, and working through. It’s good. And it kicked my ass today.

Following with the deficits… as you can see, I’d get to around 6 and that’s all I could do keeping strict. I’d start to feel things falter and refused to go forward with a rounded back and everything falling apart. Only about 90 seconds rest between those sets too. I swear, everything from mid-back to my knees was screaming afterwards. I spent much time on the foam roller at the end of this session.

Because it was really kicking me, I got back into doing farmers walks. The plates I put on the ground to give me my deficit, just pick them up and take the long way back to the plate rack. 🙂 I could only manage 3 trips because again my whole posterior chain was dying.

All in all tho, a good session. Very happy.

In other news… picked up Brandon Lilly’s new “365-Strong” book. It doesn’t add a lot over the original Cube Method book (a lot felt like a rehash, esp. due to the reuse of so many pictures and spare layout.. but it was a really nice layout and made for a good dramatic delivery of a lot of points Bradon makes), but yet it’s a good supplement. I think what it does is help clear up some of the dogma around Cube. That it’s not precisely this, but rather steps back a bit and tries to clarify what the backing philosophy is. I think Wendler does a better job at conveying “this is the meat of 5/3/1, this is what it’s about, go from there”, but I do think 365-Strong clears it up a bit more. The layout of the Cube Boss program I think also makes for a much better cookie cutter template, since a lot of people just starting out with the program will do well to have a cookie cutter at first, then branch out from there after they get a better feel for the program. I’m thinking about trying Cube Boss, or perhaps the Cube Extreme (once more gets printed about that flavor of the program). Very curious to see how such a change may benefit me. I mean, it’s been like 2 years on 5/3/1 and it’s obviously worked well for me, and I think it’s enough to not just be a program jumper. We shall see. No plans to change yet, but I’ll keep reading and thinking.