Started good, ended not so good.

Press went OK. I felt a little loose and out of groove throughout – noticed I kept losing tightness and had to re-tighten a lot. Still managed a rep PR of 165×8. Was hoping for 9 as that would have been awesome, but just wasn’t there.

As I finished the backoff sets, I felt a weird pain in my neck/shoulder area. I was pushing these sets hard. The pain is not an unfamiliar one. Something just kinks up. It’ll go away in a few days, with a lot of stretching and work. But I opted to take the rest of the session off. The back work wouldn’t help, and I was thinking about skipping or reducing the arm work anyways due to trying to reduce inflammation on my elbow.

Ah, all the fun little injuries. 😦

A big part of this all stems from poor posture. Work’s been shitty (it’s not horrible, just current project is very stressful), some other stuff getting heaped on my personal life. Life’s still good and I’m generally happy, but all the stress is just manifesting itself in my body position — and so I’m slouching a lot. Just gotta stay aware and keep my head up and shoulders back and all that. It’ll work out.

Anyways, not a bad finish to the 5’s week of this 5th cycle.

Next week will be interesting. Most all things will progress as normal, but squats — still not 100% sure what to do about it. My current thought is to take my current hits and from that calculate a 1RM, then take 90% and basically reset. Then loosely program something, which will probably be a lot of warmups up to some sort of top set of 1-3 reps at some sort of “heavy” weight, then back of to do a bunch of rep work, like 4×6 or something. Just keep it simple and put in a lot of basic squatting to build myself back up.

5/3/1 (5th cycle, leader-2, 5/3/1+PR sets)

• Press
  • bar x 10
  • 80 x 5
  • 100 x 5
  • 115 x 3
  • 125 x 5
  • 145 x 5
  • 165 x 8 (rep PR)
  • 120 x 10
  • 120 x 10
  • 120 x 10
  • 120 x 8
• Bent-over Lateral Raises (superset with press warm-up sets)
  • 25e x 10
  • 25e x 10
  • 25e x 10
  • 25e x 10
• Barbell Rows (superset with press work sets)
  • 185 x 10
  • 185 x 10
  • 185 x 8