Benanything's Training Log

[quote]Benanything wrote:

[quote]MarkKO wrote:

[quote]Benanything wrote:
26/10/15

Was supposed to do farmer’s walks today but strongman training was cancelled due to the haze.
Went to the gym to help spot some of my boys for their lifts.

Messed around with the bench and worked up to a 80kgs paused single.

Pull Ups 15x5

TOTAL PULL UPS DONE FOR THE DAY:75
[/quote]

Just wondering, how are you finding the pull ups impact on your bench? I can only guess it would be very positive. [/quote]

Haven’t found them to have much impact on my bench so far, maybe I feel a tad bit more stable. I can say for sure that doing pull ups after every single set of deadlifts ain’t a great idea though.
[/quote]

Try not to do so much or between sets if it affects the main lifts. It is just assistance work. What I have found to work well when doing pullups is to focus on quality. I typically do sternum pullups and lead with the chest. My elbows stopped aching when I focus on pulling my shoulder blades down and getting my ENTIRE back tight rather than just completing a rep. I feel this is the most important aspect that is overlooked with pull-ups and chin-ups.

I have done the same thing with barbell rows keeping my entire back, hips and hamstrings tight while executing each rep. Instead of doing reps with 225 lbs, I’ve been getting as much volume as I can with 135 lbs using relatively strict form. Some momentum is used at the very end but the entire back, hips and hamstrings ALWAYS remain tight until the set is completed. Although my bench hasn’t shot up yet, I feel a huge difference in terms of stability over the past cycle so I plan to stay committed with this style of execution. I flare my elbows out and perform them like a reverse bench press, touching at the same point on my chest as for the bench as well.

When doing all this pulling work, focusing on muscle recruitment of the entire back will help you get stronger and not just better at doing more reps or more weight. I believe this will provide the best carryover to the main lifts. It’s something I’ve been learning so I thought it would be useful to share.

@lift206

Thanks for the advice man, I’ll keep them in mind.

30/10/15

Competition Bench 35kgs x5
Competition Bench 42.5kgs x5
Competition Bench 50kgs x3
Competition Bench 60kgs x3
Competition Bench 67.5kgs x3
Competition Bench 77.5kgs x3
Legless Paused Bench 55kgs x10

My Thoughts, Reflections, Personal Feedback:
Did no pull ups today. Generally feeling tired, not gonna get the 500 pull ups this week, its fine. Gonna rest up. Supposed to have more assistance work but meh, sometimes resting is fine. Got 3 for my 3 set and its fine. Bench looks… I ain’t sure to be honest. I feel like I’ve more in me but its fine. Name of the game is long term sustainable progression after all. Oh and my left hip flexor is mega annoying right now, I can feel it while walking and shit, hopefully, it gets better soon.

EDIT: Hip flexors are worse than I thought. Even doing a bodyweight squat causes some amount of irritation.

1/11/15

Conventional Deadlift 60kgs x5
Conventional Deadlift 75kgs x5
Conventional Deadlift 90kgs x3
Conventional Deadlift 112.5kgs x5
Conventional Deadlift 127.5kgs x3
Conventional Deadlift 142.5kgs x1

My Thoughts, Reflections, Personal Feedback:
Everything felt slow as shit. Feeling tired and beat up. Can’t wait for the deload. Considering skipping the squat workout this Thursday depending on how my hip flexors feel. As you can obviously tell, didn’t do any assistance work. Just gonna use this as a opportunity to rest up.

just looked through one of my first forum posts on T-Nation, pretty darn disappointed at myself. It’s been a year and my deadlift is pretty much still the same.

[quote]Benanything wrote:
just looked through one of my first forum posts on T-Nation, pretty darn disappointed at myself. It’s been a year and my deadlift is pretty much still the same.

Don’t be disappointed in yourself. It happens. Instead, focus on fixing it.

Here are my suggestions:

  1. Cut yourself some slack. You’re a hard worker, but unfortunately you’re also a mean boss to yourself. Look through your posts, and I rather think you’ll find very frequent mentions of feeling sick, feeling tired, feeling crap, etc. That should tell you something. Deadlifts are taxing as @#$% and if you train feeling less than good a lot of the time, that’s probably the one lift guaranteed to suffer.

  2. Much as it will suck, drop your pulling load. Pull heavy (over 85%) at most once per fortnight and at that load never for more than a double. That doesn’t mean stop pulling, it just means the vast majority of your DL training should probably sit between 55% and 70% of your max. That’ll let you do three very important things: firstly, you’ll recover a ton better; secondly, you’ll be able to work on getting your technique just right; and thirdly, you’ll be able to work on speed.

For example, over a fortnight your deadlift training could look something like:

One day: 8x2@60%, less than a minute between sets. That’s a kind of dynamic effort approach. Add 5% every time you repeat it until you hit 70% and then go back to 60% but opposite stance. When you’ve done that, you’ll be six weeks in and could go and test for a new max or do another three week run from a deficit something.

At least three days no DL

One day: 3x5@70% competition stance, again adding 5% every week. Same as above, at 80% go back to 70% and pull opposite stance. You can set it up so you always do the opposite stance to day one. However, after six weeks I’d probably say don’t do deficits or anything but go 75% to 85% instead.

At least five days no DL

Third day
3 to 5 heavy singles at 85%, competition stance. Add 5% each week until 95% then drop back to 87.5% adding 5% until 98.5% then drop to 90% adding 5% until 100%.

That’d take care of 9 weeks, and as long as you didn’t run yourself into the ground on the other lifts I’d be surprised if you didn’t have a new PR by then.

Just my two cents.

@MarkKO

Thanks for the advice mate, I’ll keep it in mind and see how it goes.

2/11/15

Did some tire flips. Did 1 walk of farmers. Messed around a bit, figured might as well just do my 1+ set for my presses today(instead of tomorrow). Did 60kgs x 2 followed by 2 singles.

60kgs x 2

My Thoughts, Reflections, Personal Feedback:
Will be skipping the squat session for this week. Doing the bench session sometime later this week. Next week is deload. After that, I’ll run 531 with a far more conservative set of maxes, keeping in account fatigue and recovery and time management and a bunch of other shit. Oh and school. Don’t forget school.

[/quote] Will be skipping the squat session for this week. Doing the bench session sometime later this week. Next week is deload. After that, I’ll run 531 with a far more conservative set of maxes, keeping in account fatigue and recovery and time management and a bunch of other shit. Oh and school. Don’t forget school.
[/quote]

That sounds like a very good call, and a plan that will deliver results.

@MarkKO

Agreed. Thanks for sticking around Mark, its pretty encouraging and it means quite a fair bit to me.

[quote]Benanything wrote:
@MarkKO

Agreed. Thanks for sticking around Mark, its pretty encouraging and it means quite a fair bit to me.[/quote]

That’s what we’re here for my friend.

[quote]MarkKO wrote:

[quote]Benanything wrote:
@MarkKO

Agreed. Thanks for sticking around Mark, its pretty encouraging and it means quite a fair bit to me.[/quote]

That’s what we’re here for my friend. [/quote]

Yes, definitely want to see you do well.

[quote]Benanything wrote:
just looked through one of my first forum posts on T-Nation, pretty darn disappointed at myself. It’s been a year and my deadlift is pretty much still the same.

IMO, I think you would do well to start the 5/3/1 BBB 3-Month Challenge with an 85-90% training max and just get in volume with the main lifts. When was the last time you consistently put in a lot of volume with the main lifts? When was the last time you made volume the goal for progression instead of a single max rep set? It seems like you’ve been pushing low rep work for quite awhile now and a bit more balance would help since not as much progress is being made.

Edit: I just remembered that you made the change last month to a bit more volume work, lol. You’ll see progress in time. With the heavy sets, try to limit how often you need to grind to get that last rep because it can get very taxing. Grinding to hit a PR is fine but grinding most sessions can take its toll.

@lift206

Second time replying to this, T Nation forums tend to fuck up at times or maybe its just me. But anyways, I’ve got something better(?) in mind. I’ll be doing the 27 week variation of 531 BBB as per written in the Beyond 531 book, no changes, none what so ever. Sticking to the book, to quote Jim, “Do you want to be entertained or get big and strong?”. I do want to get big and strong and I’ve realized that I’ve spent far too long fucking around and not making the gains I’ve could’ve been making. This ends here. Gainsville, here I come.

[quote]Benanything wrote:
@lift206

Second time replying to this, T Nation forums tend to fuck up at times or maybe its just me. But anyways, I’ve got something better(?) in mind. I’ll be doing the 27 week variation of 531 BBB as per written in the Beyond 531 book, no changes, none what so ever. Sticking to the book, to quote Jim, “Do you want to be entertained or get big and strong?”. I do want to get big and strong and I’ve realized that I’ve spent far too long fucking around and not making the gains I’ve could’ve been making. This ends here. Gainsville, here I come.[/quote]

This. 27 weeks will fly by and at the end of it you’ll be in a very different position. Strength and size gains aside, you’ll have practiced the big lifts so much you’ll be vastly better at doing them.

@MarkKO

Here’s hoping, haha.

[quote]Benanything wrote:
@lift206

Second time replying to this, T Nation forums tend to fuck up at times or maybe its just me. But anyways, I’ve got something better(?) in mind. I’ll be doing the 27 week variation of 531 BBB as per written in the Beyond 531 book, no changes, none what so ever. Sticking to the book, to quote Jim, “Do you want to be entertained or get big and strong?”. I do want to get big and strong and I’ve realized that I’ve spent far too long fucking around and not making the gains I’ve could’ve been making. This ends here. Gainsville, here I come.[/quote]

That’s awesome. I think you’ll make great progress. Like Wendler said, don’t live and die by the one-rep max. That applies to a rep-max set as well - although they are very good checkpoints for progress. If you hit volume PRs, if certain weights feel easier than before, if you reduce recovery time, etc., those are all forms of progress. Take notice of all areas of improvement. Sometimes feeling great after a workout is a good thing. You want to do well over the course of an entire training cycle and not just a few sessions.

A suggestion that may help is to write down a few training principles you think are important before starting the 27 weeks and come back to them often so you don’t stray away from them. An example for me after I had a shitty meet at the end of last year were: 1) Use bar speed to help me listen to my body, 2) Focus on bar control, 3) Core shall not fail. Looking back on those principles often helped me stick to the path so that I wouldn’t chase numbers, get ahead of myself, or make the same mistakes. It has helped a lot.

Edit: I just looked at the 27-week program and it looks great. I don’t think you’ll regret doing it.

[quote]Benanything wrote:
@MarkKO

Here’s hoping, haha.[/quote]

It’ll work.

I was semi-dubious about how effective increased volume at lighter loads could be (I never said I was smart) until I got desperate enough to try it for my bench.

It works. You just have to put I’m the reps and work hard on making everything about the lift optimal for you.

@lift206

I’ll look into doing that by the end of the week or something.

@MarkKO

Well, I guess you’ll have the chance to say “I told you so” in roughly 30-ish weeks, haha.

How strong are you? Really?

Well, just a thought that has been on my mind as of late. No doubt, part of it came as inspiration from this other thread, How Long Before You Looked Like You Lift? - Bigger Stronger Leaner - Forums - T Nation .

But anyways, the thought would is, basically, I used to think if you’re moving more weight, you’re getting stronger, that would make sense right? More weight moved = more strength. Well, that was the case up until I actually started thinking about it hard. Regardless of whatever “strength” sport it is, there’ll always be an element of technique/leverages/etc involved. Example being Eddie Berglund on Instagram: "3 reps att 157,5 in bench #dcore #tyngre" and etc. Not to take anything away from people who’re utilizing such advantages as and when they can. They want to win, I get it, I would do the same. Doing whatever it takes to win, that’s great. But yeah, people seem to forget that a major part of strength sports is actually getting stronger. Maybe this is why “5/3/1: How to Build Pure Strength” just seem to be rather appealing to me. Getting stronger, it ain’t for everyone. I know its for me, I might not be strong now, but in time, I shall. Hopefully.