2003 archives (page 10)

… guess I am one then. After a pretty good nine sets of speed benching I went on for a five rep max on the incline bench. My previous max was 75 kg/166 lbs on both the powersmith and with a barbell, so it was only natural that I would attempt to break new ground after doing a fiver with 70 kg/155 lbs. After an easy rep with 80 kg/177 lbs, I had the second rep jam a bit off my chest. Tried 85 kg/188 lbs, but same deal for the first rep. Might want to do these as my first ME exercise in the near future without the tiring five-reppers to see if I could not nail that one. I haven’t precisely done a lot of incline work of late anyway.

First go at rack pulls (i.e. partial deadlifts) from the first pin. As the rack is of the kind with very thick pins, the only conceivable heights for rack pulls are the first and second pins. Makes it simple.

Last week I did pulls off the second pin after maxing out on the box, to my surprise resulting in a fiver with 190 kg/420 lbs. With a current max deadlift of 145 kg/320 lbs, I clearly had the reference values set. Pulled a hard 155 kg/343 lbs and then failed to get lift-off with 160 kg/354 lbs. Decent.

Added 5 kg/11 lbs to my recent max 10 on kneeling squats very barely making it. Also felt like pounding the abs with a little heavier weights and put a total of 20 kg/44 lbs behind my neck for ball crunches. Needless to say, I did this with my feet supported to prevent myself from making a stunning descent through the floor.

Came down with a flu resulting in three-days of sick leave. Tomorrow I will be benching in my dreams, but there is a slight chance that I will be in shape for Friday as I, for once, am nipping this in the bud. Realistically speaking, I have my eyes set on Sunday.

After seeing the required nurse, I popped into a music store to buy Finnish band Charon’s The Dying Daylights album to take this coughing opportunity to continue my education in Scandinavian metal post-Kalmah. With its goth inspired soft metal sound a little reminiscent of H.I.M., Charon is a lot lighter and less rough around the edges than Kalmah (read: more commercially attractive). As I found an excellent, albeit a little more optimistic than my opinion, review of the album I will refrain from attempting to write a comprehensive review bound to trip over itself. Another good review is to be found over at metal-rules.com. Let me just say that the In Trust of No One track is suitable for auto-repeat (music samples here). I presume the rest of the album will follow suit once I get to listen through it a few times, like St. Anger before it. That’s the way my ears work.

The patient has recovered. Nothing revolutionary here, but made some good gains on the stability ball dumbell bench and added a few reps here and there compared to last week’s workout.

Did forward-incline dumbell curls for the biceps, which involves standing and leaning forward against a bench that has been inclined a little (about two notches from vertical). Curling from this position gives very little room for cheating and changes the angles a little. I don’t know how standard this exercise is, I remember coming up with it in the early bodybuilding days. Needless to say, I don’t consider myself its [evil] genius inventor as people around the world have no doubt been curling away in this position for years.

As the dutiful Westside boy I am, I went for good mornings today. I was hoping on setting a new 5 rep max at 105 kg/232 lbs. Everything went fine until I went down for the second rep with 95 kg/210 lbs on my back. It was a deep rep, at least parallel. When I started pushing into the bar to get back up I felt something in my lower back and the bar came crashing down on the pins. I dare not think what would have happened had I been doing my good mornings outside the rack.

My first though was that “now it finally happened, I just popped my back in two”. But the pain failed to materialize and I seemed to have a full range of motion (at least physically). Furthermore, when it happened it didn’t feel like something burst into pieces, it was more like something “rolled down a little”. My best guess is that I have a back sprain in the sacroiliac region and not a slipped disc. My copy of A Complete Guide to Sports Injuries informs me that a mild sprain of this kind should heal within 2-6 weeks with a moderate sprain requiring 6-8 weeks. Seems like I won’t be getting a big deadlift for Christmas.

The best I can hope for is that I can continue working my upper body, which would give me an excellent opportunity to boost my bench. How I feel tomorrow morning will probably be quite indicative of how badly I hurt myself. It goes without saying that I will have to think over my relationship with the good morning after this. I might be guilty of rushing things a little on this front by going too heavy too soon.

I’m happy to report that the injury I sustained doing good mornings on Monday is not, relatively speaking, all that bad. A slight bruise showed up on the spot where the strain occurred indicating some internal bleeding, but judging from its light color and size it wasn’t too severe. Although I had a very hard time sitting for any length of time yesterday, things where feeling somewhat better today following extensive icing, liberal amounts of IcePower, ibuprofen to lessen swelling and frequent 1000 mg doses of vitamin C. I guess a fair assessment is that people around me won’t notice I’m injured before I need to bend over (have to sit down to tie my shoelaces) although I do continuously feel the injury. I’m so happy we bought a new lower back friendly bed, since this is still going to take weeks to clear up (always the optimist).

With the bad comes the good. Ordered Stuart McGill’s Low Back Disorders from Amazon after this book turned out to be the bible on the subject of lower back injuries. There is an excellent two-part interview with this Mr. Spine over at T-mag (part I, part II). In short, I am going to let this injury teach me the lesson I deserve and take this opportunity to work on technique. Meanwhile, I think I will be able to continue my bench workouts as long as I avoid movements that hit the lower back. Will also continue the ice-IcePower-C-ibuprofen treatment for at least 72 hours following the strain.

Thought floor presses would be an ideal candidate for a back strain friendly max effort movement. Indeed they were as they effectively take the lower body out of the equation. Despite a fairly easy rep with my previous max 90 kg/199 lbs I decided to play smart for once and proceed in small increments. Better to end up at 95 kg/210 lbs than fail at 100 kg/221 lbs and be left with no new max (like I did on the bench last time). Managed to get 95 kg/210 lbs and 97.5 kg/215 lbs, but could not get 100 kg/221 lbs further than slightly off the ground after first nearly tipping it over while balancing it on my elbows for two-three seconds. Felt my right shoulder getting a little sore during the movement, but it cleared up after some post-workout icing.

To continue keeping stress off the back I did some triceps extensions on the floor and chest supported t-bar rows in very strict style.

Finally added a page showing my progress in the maximum effort lifts for the squat/deadlift and bench. The whole thing is broken down by month making for easy comparison. This sure beats manually searching for my results in the blog or in my training notes whenever I can’t remember what my previous max was. Also handy for seeing what I haven’t maxed out on in a while. Looking it at I am painfully aware of the fact that I need to do more maxes with different grips on the bench exercises and not just sticking to one grip.

Happy days! Sanna’s brother was kind enough to lend us his Canon PowerShot A70 for the purpose of documenting our ginger bread house project (will probably appear at another section of this site at some point). As this digital camera is also capable of recording avi video snippets it would have been futile to resist taking it to the gym. I was most interested in taping my speed benches to check my form, but then went on to film the first set of every subsequent exercise. Presto! My first training video. I am releasing it here in the hopes that someone more experienced than me might provide some valuable feedback and to add some needed visual context to this blog. Besides, training videos are always fun.

I have no bragging rights with these weights, but I will as sure as @”#¤! get much stronger and then I for one will enjoy looking at the puny weights I’m moving now. Without further ado: DE Bench video (5.23M). If you are on Windows you can either view the video directly by just clicking on the link (if a sidebar appears pop the video view off it to get the full 320x240 size) or save it by right clicking -> Save Target As. The latter method is much preferable if you plan to watch it more than once to save bandwidth.

The ginger house project brought the camera into the gym at a very auspicious moment as I had just received JM Blakley’s Building the Perfect Beast bench technique video. Although my mind revolved around such issues as arching and torso tilting, foremost was the idea of elbow tucking. For one thing, the video finally made it clear precisely what elbow tucking is all about, i.e. getting the elbows in far enough so that the angle between the humerus (upper arm bone) and the midline of the body (spine) is no more than 45 degrees. More pressingly (pun intended) JM explained that not tucking the elbows enough puts a lot of strain on the shoulder structure. He particularly highlighted exactly the part of the shoulder that I’ve had problems with in the past, most recently while maxing out on the floor press. No siree, the arch can wait. Getting the elbows in to protect the shoulder can’t.

First I did a couple of sets of wide-grip speed benches with my standard form and taped those. Then I went through several really light sets trying to concentrate on tucking the elbows in. After that I did my normal speed bench sets with the normal 60 kg/133 lbs and taped one of them. The difference was quite striking: not only did my elbows stay tucked in far better, but the bar path became more consistent as measured by where the bar hit the chest (got this from the video: put some chalk at the mid-point of the bar and then bench away; if you have your form down you should only have a single chalk line on your shirt after several reps). The frames below are from the video; the screenshot on the left shows my normal bench form and the one on the right, I hope, proper elbow tucking.

Now if I can only keep the elbows in while going heavier I’ll be a happy man with healthy shoulders.

After a long struggle with various video codecs and RAM limits, I finally have my ME Bench video done for this workout (download 7.4M). Since Windows Media Video 9 (WMV) currently gives the best tradeoff between quality and file size, I have somewhat grudgingly settled for that, but only because it now also runs on Unix/Linux systems thanks to the great MPlayer (also the base for the Movix distribution, which creates self-contained video CDs… but I digress). The whole workout is not on video, but at least the best set of every exercise is. Enjoy and please comment if you find any problems with my bench or have other feedback. I finally removed the password protection from the commenting system (something I’ve been happily unaware of for the last few months) so that is no longer an excuse.

On to the workout. I had planned on doing close-grip floor presses as my max exercise, but having a digital camera present was too good an opportunity for filming my bench. My strained lower back is still far from healed (no surprise there!), but it hurts less and it seems to be able to sustain heavy chest workouts as long as I support my lower back during rowing movements. I was also longing to setting a new PR by avoiding the mistake of doing too big jumps. I knew I had it in me.

After doing a triple with a somewhat unbalanced 75 kg/166 lbs caused by the plates on the left side of the bar being away from the collars (if you look closely at the video you will see that I press unevenly on that set) I easily pushed up 85 kg/188 lbs and 95 kg/210 lbs for a new PR. I very nearly got 100 kg/221 lbs through my sticking point, but ended up holding it there for a while… same deal after I dropped down to 97.5 kg/215 lbs.

As I felt like going a little heavier for the triceps as well, I did rack lockouts off the 5th pin in the groovy power rack environment. My previous max done as the first exercise, 130 kg/287 lbs, did not go today. No sweat, that wasn’t what I was there for. Rounded off with the usual back and delt work.

With several projects in the pipeline before Christmas, I am trying to clear all lingering small things out of the way. In this spirit I offer thee a dynamic effort bench script (enter shirtless bench max and get recommendations for straight weight, chains and bands) and various three-week box squat cycles based on the article TNT II: More Tips-n-Tricks for Strength and Size by Dave Tate. Let me know if you find any errors or have suggestions for improvements.