My Powerlifting/Olympic lifting log

Low bar squat feels very comfy and 250x5 went smoothly, front squat is up too 165x5, I feel like that should be higher. I hit 190x3 for bench and 185x5 is now a regular lift. On my last rep of 190 it slipped a little to much forward but I recovered and got it. I need to go slower and focus on form. I also changed incline bench to some pause bench and that was harder than I expected. I only did 140x5 with a 4 second pause. Is dropping that much weight for pause bench normal? It is my first time doing it. I am very happy with my results so far.

Probably depends on how you do your normal bench.

4 second pauses are pretty long though. Why 4 seconds?

@magick I’m not even sure. I just needed a time to pause and felt that 4 sounded pretty good.

OHP is really pissing me off. My weight is going down every week. I could barely get 115x5, I got it once out of 5 attempts and almost fell over. It should be getting better and going up in weight, all my other lifts are but this is getting harder. Even pullups today were extremely hard. Doing a set with a 35 pound plate is easy but today I barely got it. Maybe its my back and rear delts? From bench and low bar squats maybe they are just sore and tired. Any ideas?

I think a second or two is sufficient if you’re simply looking to remove the stretch reflex.

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In for your log.

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same

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Don’t worry about it bud. You’re young. Overhead stuff can be weird.
I’m relatively strong, but my OHP is poop. It happens. Stick with it. In 5+ years it’ll be a lot better than where it is now.

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Probably not doing enough total work for the lift to improve or maintain. Generally speaking OHP should probably be trained at least twice week in different ways. One day kind of heavy and day for volume.

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@magick That sounds good, I will see how that goes next time. @duketheslaya and @yargeeboy Thank you both for the interest in my log. And @BEAst_in_I and @brady888 , I really appreciate the replies and will update you on what I do.

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I changed it up a bit and did OHP on Monday to see how it felt and I got 120x3 decently easy. The strength is definitely there. But deadlift today was terrible, my back was so tired and I couldn’t even get 255 without rounding my back so I decided to do squats today. I did box squats with 225 to switch things up, they went wel. I’ll take an ice bath and hopefully with tomorrow as a rest day and Thursday as bench I can hit deadlift fresh and new on Friday. If it works well I will stick with this change of lifts.

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Bench went okay today but I need to work on form. 185x5 has been going smoothly but 190 is still iffy. I got it last week but this week I needed some help. I feel like it’s to low on my chest and I’m using to much triceps. The bar lands at the bottom of my sternum where my ribcage meets, I feel like it should be right below my nipples, so I can use more chest. I might do 10 sets of 2 next week just to change it up.

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Did 10 sets of 2 for squat and it sucked, which means it went really good. It was hard and a grind, although I’m not to sure if I’m leaning over to much, my lower back is a little sore. I feel like I’m hitting appropriate depth. I also front squatted 160x5. Did good today, next week I’ll get 255 for squat.

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I did 10 sets of 2 for bench on Tuesday and that went really well. The lifts went as follows, 155, 175, 185 (6 sets of 2), 180, 175. I then did pause bench with 160x5, 160x3, 155x5, and 150x5. It was a brutal and awesome workout.

For deadlift I did 10 sets of 6. No straps, no chalk. I was supposed to do 70% of my 1rm, but I only have a 5rm(280), 70% is 196 If I did the math right, so I did 205 instead, and it was brutal as well, my shins are almost bleeding. I followed it up with some pause sets of 185 and then did leg press because the squat racks were taken up, and supersetted it with reverse hyper extension and some T-bar rows.

OHP is going way better than it has been. I did the same type of 10x2 set up that I’ve been doing this week and it is great. I super settled with weighted pull ups, adding up to a lot in total. 6 or 7 out of those 10 sets were with 120, so it is definitely getting stronger, jus slower than the others. My pull ups are great, doing a set of 45x5 is easy now. I also did some military press super settled with body weight pull-ups and my regular assistance shoulder supersets.

Squatted today and I finally found a cure to my question “am I hitting depth”. I have been at about parallel all summer but now I am hitting perfect depth. It was a simple as moving my feet closer in. It made it significantly harder and my quads were worked a lot more, I did 1 set of 225x5 and then had to go down to 205x5. Not sure if that is to much of a decrease in weight, but at least Im squatting properly and hopefully that will transfer over to a faster increase in strength and size now. I also got my front squat to 175x3. What are your thoughts on the weight decrease?

I’m starting to come to the conclusion that it is generally better to go lighter than you think you should and do more quality reps.

If going lower than parallel is your goal, then you should absolutely decrease weight.

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@magick Thank you for the reply. That’s what my plan is going to be.

I did bench today and for the past three weeks I have not been able to do 190 for more than 3 reps. It’s very frustrating. The first week I did it it went smoothly, but since than 190x3 has been choppy and I can’t progress higher. Instead of doing 165,175,185,190, should I be doing 185 for multiple sets of 5, or even 180 or 175 for multiple sets of 5?

Yeah back up a little and do some volume with lighter weight, come back to 190 in a few weeks.

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160-175lb for multiple sets would be a good idea, imo.

But, honestly, I’d look into form and muscle imbalances. My upper body pushing strength is bad and progresses at a very slow rate. I am convinced that this is mostly because of muscular imbalances and shit bench press technique.

Heavier weights will bring out various weaknesses.

If a weight you did pretty ok a couple of weeks ago feels heavy now, then that may be because of some issue unrelated to training. How’s your sleep/diet been?

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