Not feeling it.

Wendler 5/3/1 program, cycle 25, week 1

• Work Set – Bench Press (working max: 230#)
  • 45 x 5 x 2 sets (warmup)
  • 95 x 5
  • 115 x 5
  • 140 x 3
  • 150 x 5 (work)
  • 175 x 5
  • 200 x 6
• Assistance – Face Pulls (superset with the 5 warm-up bench sets)
  • 30 x 15 x 11 5
• Assistance – Close-grip bench press
  • 120 x 10
  • 120 x 10
  • 120 x 10
  • 120 x 10
  • 120 x 8
• Assistance – Lat pulldowns (superset with the close-grips)
  • 110 x 10 x 3 sets — supine grip
  • 110 x 10 x 2 sets — pronated grip
• Assistance – Seated Cable Rows
  • 100 x 10 x 3 sets
• Foam Rolling

I’ve got some heavy personal stuff weighing on my head and heart. So today I just wasn’t into it.

If anything tho, I did some playing around with things to try to help figure out my shoulder and elbow issues. I just did very light face pulls and only superset with my warmup sets; basically, treat it all as one big warm-up for my shoulder area. Nothing during my work sets, to minimize any impact there.

I tried close-grips because why not. I kinda want to do them, but it was also a check to see about something. My pain seems to hit most when I have a pronated grip and my arm (elbow) comes to almost-full flexion. Maybe something with the “compression” pressure of the forearm and biceps coming together, pressure of them squeezed together coupled with kinda “leveraging” the elbow apart, y’know? I noticed pressing was painful, and the pull-ups are doing this… so I’m experimenting.

The close-grips were good for my shoulders of course, but certainly seemed to play more into my elbows. Doing supine-grip pulldowns helped my elbows, but funny was that it didn’t work well because of too my skin friction from my arms being too close to my upper body (too much skin rubbing). 🙂 So I did the last 2 sets pronated and yeah, I could feel the forearm pain.

Could it be that these muscles are also weak and getting pushed to the limit? I really dont’ know, but with my recent grip failure issues, I do wonder.

Anyways, I am going to keep playing around with this. I may not be doing “ideal” exercises, but if it helps to keep me progressing in some way while not contributing to problems, then great. I’ll just keep playing around here.

Oh… one other thing. All assistance work was striving for “heavy” reps with only about 1 minute of rest between sets. Yeah, trying to get a little more bodybuilder here, wanting to see about building more muscle mass with my assistance work.