“It’s a long way to the top, if you wanna rock-n-roll!”. AC/DC is the soundtrack of the day.

Lately I’ve been feeling like my back is rounding too much when I deadlift. As I lift alone, the only way to be sure was video. So I took some videos of my top set and the pyramid-down sets. Back looked good (to my eye). Some rounding at the shoulders, but that’s OK. The lower-half is more my concern and it looked fine. But I did see on the video something I didn’t expect!

When I broke ground, the bar drifted back into me. A while ago I noticed where I was setting the bar down and opted to change my starting position accordingly to see what it would do for me. The bar was positioned just over the 2nd eyelet of my shoes. It felt a little forward at first, but I grew used to it. Even still, there were pulls where it didn’t feel right but I kept going with the experiment. Today shows me that it is NOT an ideal bar path for the pull for me. I played around some. Over the 3rd eyelet looked about as straight a bar path as I can get it (given body physiology, knees, leg lengths, etc.). Over the 4th eyelet and the bar rolled away from me on the setup (ha ha) so that was too far back. I’ll go back to 3rd and see how it goes over the next 2 weeks as the weights get heavier. But it did feel better overall, so there we go. Video.

Hypers were fine. I keep thinking about adding weight, but if I really put effort into making every rep quality, bodyweight is enough to kick my ass (literally).

Leg curls. Flexing my feet is making a positive difference.

And crunches I’m going to start to vary this. One day I’ll just do bodyweight for AMRAP, then another I’ll add weight for lower reps and do a weight progression. Today I tried it, holding a 25# plate at arms length above me while I crunched up. That was different. I’ll keep playing with positioning, weight, etc. to see what I can do here.

Really, the more I work to make every rep a quality rep, instead of just slamming through to make the “count”, what a difference it makes.

All in all, not a bad day. Learned something.

• Deadlift
  • 175 x 5
  • 220 x 5
  • 265 x 3
  • 285 x 5
  • 330 x 5
  • 375 x 7
  • 330 x 8
  • 285 x 8
• Hyperextensions
  • BW x 15
  • BW x 15
  • BW x 15
  • BW x 15
• Leg Curls
  • 50 x 12
  • 50 x 12
  • 50 x 10
• Crunches
  • BW x 12
  • 25 x 12
  • 25 x 12