Today brought everyone out — gym was crazy busy. This is why I like being an early person — get the optimal racks and equipment. 😉

That said, sometimes I do wish for fixed benches. Having to set the hooks, bars, bench, etc. every time gets things slightly off. And today was no fun, because I hit the hooks a couple times and really threw myself off. My own fault, as I need to make sure to keep positioning and checking the position of things, like if the bench may have slid back a bit. It’s just more learning the new gym, the new equipment.

Incline work went quite well. I think I will up the weight 5-10# next session on the work-up, because that 225 goes up so fast, so easy. I also had the thought today about dropping the incline angle. I’m setting it at about a 45º angle, but I’ve wondered about going 30º or so. Mostly to start to see if I can get back to flat benching. I’m thinking that after this hypertrophy block I might do something like basebuilding for 6 weeks or so, and if I do that I want to flat bench. Anyways, if I do increase the weight, the AMRAP will stay where it is. I might have felt different, but I hit the hooks on this and it threw me off. I want to get a clean 12 and 6 before I up the weight there.

DB benching continues to be awesome. I love this scheme.

Flies were fine. I’m going to keep the weight here but move to a max of 15 reps before I up the weight again.

Pressing. Man, part of me wants to get back to a 5/3/1 style where I press heavy on the regular. I do miss that.

Then the raises. I really don’t care much about reps here, just making pain. And when I do those final burns, to make sure the movement is purely from muscular contraction. It hurts, it hurts. But I am seeing some nice results.

20 on the elliptical. Then all that rolling and stretching. It’s helping me so much. Heck, there was something in my lower lumbar vetebrae that popped the other day, because I could finally stretch/twist through enough. It was… amazing. The past some weeks (months?) I’ve been feeling all this low back pain/discomfort, that was starting to really worry me. But that’s all it was — a “stuck” vertebrae. One that popped, oh it was glorious. Now everything feels awesome. And this is how it often goes. Muscles are all tight, things get “locked” in weird ways, stretch and let things relax and release, and boy does everything release eventually. And then things are SO much better.

• Incline Press
  • bar x 10
  • 115 x 5
  • 135 x 4
  • 155 x 3
  • 175 x 2
  • 195 x 1
  • 215 x 1
  • 225 x 1
  • 185 x 12 (AMRAP)
  • 185 x 5 (50%)
• DB Bench Press (pause at bottom, get the stretch)
  • 40e x 10 (warm up)
  • 55e x 8 (warm up)
  • 90e x 8
  • 65e x 14
  • 40e x 22
• DB Flat Flies
  • 25e x 12
  • 25e x 12
  • 25e x 15
  • 20e x 6 (drop)
  • 15e x 5 (drop)
• Press
  • 115 x 10
  • 115 x 10
  • 115 x 8
• Front Plate Raise (tri set)
  • 45 x 12
  • 45 x 9
  • 45 x 7
• DB Lateral Raise (tri set)
  • 15e x 10
  • 15e x 7
  • 15e x 5 (then burns)
• Rear Lateral Raise (tri set)
  • 12e x 10
  • 12e x 10
  • 12e x 8 (then burns)