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Rehab your ankle, strength comes and goes, it's just part of the game. Be smart about it though. No point making your injury worse. Ice, rest, medicate. Start on getting mobility back and having your injured foot being weight bearing before thinking about gym. With a grade 2 you probably can't even bench press without pain. Don't push it, just be patient.

 I dont think i took much time off when I sprained my ankle earlier this year. i might have missed a couple of workouts but i found i could squat with my ankle taped up. if you have very little fwd knee travel, ankles dont flex much and you can get away with squatting to about parallel without bothering your ankle.

With ankle injuries, prevention is the best thing. Lance said something about being proactive about how you jump in games. You pick out an area to land which is low traffic and unoccupied. Don't jump higher than necessary. That's gold wisdom. Box out on rebounds so you have space to land safely. Get in a good position for a rebound and don't just jump up as high as you can from wherever you are. And is a rebound in a pickup game really worth your health and being able to train injury free?

I see guys here eeking out impressive improvements in their VJ thru training. Are commensurate improvements possible for sprinting as well thru training?

FUCK it just occured to me why my deadlift was pretty today. It just came to me in a flash of insight.....

the reason.....

is

BECAUSE I DID RDLS first!!!!!

They warmed up or stretched my hamstrings, allowing me to get them in a good position which allowed me to set my back perfectly flat. That's it, it's the rational explanation.  

Hmm I wonder if this has any ramifications for backsquat. Perhaps I could do some warmup RDLs before squatting and see what difference it makes.

After squatting today, I have recently come to believe my weak core (esp lower back) is the reason why i suck at backsquatting. It's why wearing a belt helps me so much. With my proportions, I have so much tension on my abs at the bottom of a squat, on account of my leverages, that my abs and lower back need to be made of steel to lift even modest tonnages. step back, im on this. I put on the belt for 112.5 I think, after doing 105 w/o belt, and the velcro wanted to open up at the bottom of a squat. It was eerie. So that just goes to show how hard my abs have to work to stabilise even such a light squat load. Interesting stuff.

raptor, in or on?

BW:81.95kg/180.67lb
Soreness: a little abs, a little hams, a little quads

That's 3 days of being under 82kg in a row, so i'm happy to think it has stuck. That overnight kilo loss is here to stay.

PR - waist is now 34" 

Feeling good about fat loss, I have my birthday coming up this week but i'll probably stay true to my diet, don't really feel like celebrating anyways. I'd rather get under 80kg asap. With the weather warming up, i'm feeling good about being lean, the idea of a summer without being fat is a novel thing. Once my body weight has stabilised a little, i'm going shopping for a new wardrobe. Have been holding off buying new clothes since my bodyweight has been in constant flux the last year and a half. Most of my clothes don't fit me anymore. The other day I went sprinting and my shorts were falling off my waist lol.. i'm no longer an XL 

I'm going to continue being aggressive about dropping under 80kg to get there quickly. The faster I am done cutting, the sooner I can get down to building some muscle and finally being in a position to drive my lifts up hard.

Training
FSTM (4.5kph, 700m)

TM warmup (300m)
BP 6x81.5 (PR!!), 6x77, 6x73, 3x5x75 (wide grip - PR)

TM warmup (300m)
FS 4x100 (PR!!)), 4x95, 4x92.5, 4x90
BS 1x100, 1x105, 1x110B, 1x112.5B, 1x115B, 1x117.5B
RDL 3x130(PR!!)), 10x105(PR!!))
DL 2x3x95 (felt real light, form was good, i dunno how it happened but now I can DL with good form!)
ABZ
  - weighted crunch 15x37.5,15x45, 8x55

Have been patient waiting for the new week to start so I can bump up the daily TM parameters. Took a 0.2kph bump because I wanna get up to 5kph faster than 0.1kph/week increments will allow. Once I get to 5 i'll take 0.1 bumps though. Also bumped up the distance from 650m to 700m. While i'm still overweight (for my lbm), daily fasted TM work is a good idea even if it will take up a new meaning once i'm down to stubborn fat levels (~10% bf).

BP notes:
Finally a break thru - i got 6x81.5 at last, it took me 4 consecutive workouts but it's done. Now I might stick with the same weight until it's not so damn heavy. Once it becomes lighter, i'll take the reset to 80kg and change to bigger plates. They're slightly heavier than expected, that's why i'm being very cautious around the 80kg plate boundary. To get 81.5kg I have 2x20kg, 2x5kg, 2x2.5kg and then 8x0.5kg plates. So a lot of plates but now my aim is to transition smoothly into the bigger 2x10kg plates, ie. 2x20kg, 2x10kg and from then from there 'll chase 6x85. Oh yea and the wide grip assistance has gotten very heavy (RPE 10). I think i'll stay with the weight until it's easier, and once it becomes lighter, i'll go aim for 3x8 with the same weight. That should be enough stress to keep my chest stimulated for quite a while.

FS notes:
Well looks like I made another break thru in squatting. Something Lance said turned me on to it. Turns out it's better to FS first and then BS because that way the FS form remains pure. Doing it the other way like I had been, instructs my body to behave incorrectly which doesn't happen if I just FS first. But what about BS after FS? That works fine. My guess is that for HBBS that's the way to go, FS and then HBBS reinforces upright squatting. If you are a LBBS squatter though, you probably don't want to pollute your LBBS by doing upright FS first, so in that case you would probably want to LBBS first and then FS last.

RDL notes:
Back was straight this week on the heavy RDL, back on the wagon. 150x3 by the year end thank you very much.

ABZ notes:
Think i got the hang of these weighted crunches. They caused wicked soreness since friday btw which is why i'm going to keep doing them. The problem is, it's hard to get in position with all these fkn plates on my chest. Also my tiny hands can only grip 2x20kg plates + 1x10kg and including the 4th plate, its all too thick for me to hold properly. I might be able to use the 15kg instead of 10 next time, but then what? 3x20s isn't going to happen unless I grow my paws some. If only I had heavy DBs Damn shame because this is a great exercise. Btw I can't just hug the plates because it limits ROM. Maybe i'll experiment and see what I can do about it.

Training
650m FTM

Not doing anything else today. I'll give my body a break and reward it for surprising me with an overnight whoosh on the scale. Well under 82kg now! And I had no reason to expect it. Usually the day after training days, my bodyweight increases slightly but never decreases. I ate a carb heavy meal last night to refeed gylocogen after a hard week of training.  And what a shock to see the scale drop. I guess sometimes it takes a refeed to trigger a weight drop. Lets see if it sticks over the next coupla days.

BW: 81.7kg/180.12lb

You wont get an accurate percentage without training with them, however, you can test a few sites, record the mm's, and see if youre improving or not.  A good set of calipers is expensive, knock off plastic ones will work for what I posted though.

The slim guide ones aren't too expensive and they're decent. I can see them for $33 here and we usually get taxed like crazy. Also if you can't see your abs then forget skinfolds and just keep cutting until you can, everything else is just noise.

edit. Looking online I see them in the US for about $12-15 on amazon. So they're fairly inexpensive. Lance if you ever get your hands on one would be nice to have a review!

Well , i am not a diet expert but there is a missing link here. What was your bodyfat percentage before the cut?
BTW, i don't mean to insult you or call you fat or something. I am not muscular either and i have a very hard time going under 15% or a 35'' waist. I was jsut very surprised to see you at 20% in the middle of what looks like a well planned and sucessful cut.

If we work backwards, my bodyfat at 86-87kg would have been around 22%. I thought it was over 20%, so i wasn't too much off. I never got a DEXA though. If I had, it might have showed I was maybe 24-25%. I don't know.

And why was it that high? BTW, i don't mean to insult you or call you fat or something. I am not muscular either and i have a very hard time going under 15% or a 35'' waist. I was jsut very surprised to see you at 20% in the middle of what looks like a well planned and sucessful cut.

No offense taken. Why it was that high. Good question! I got measured twice with a 7point caliper test as follows:

+ 100kg BW - bodyfat 25% (fat mass of 25kg, lean mass of 75kg).
+ Charts and BMI measurements for my height and bodyweight also suggested the same thing.

So that means at 85kg, i should have been 12% bodyfat.

I dieted down to 85kg and surprisingly no abs in sight!! So i kept dieting. And now at around 82.5kg and i'm still not even close to 15%. Which means my previous bodyfat measurements were way off. I wasn't 25% i was probably 35% and up.

This is the danger of not getting down to a low initial bodyfat when training. Because you don't know how fat you really are and estimates are hard to get right. It's when you get down to seeing abs that you have a realistic idea of what your lean mass is, and from there you have a good idea of how gains in bodyweight are partioned btw fat and muscle. I never got down to 10%. So where I was starting my bulks (at a supposedly 85kg ~ 15% estimated) - i should actually have been ENDING my bulks somewhere 5kg lower. This is bad news for p-ratio which means gains are mostly fat. Big mistake. People tell you that if you are over 6 foot tall you should weigh such 200-220. And if you listen to them you end up very overweight. I listened to them.

If only I had dropped $300-500 on a DEXA it would have been a sound investment. If there is one thing i could change about my training, it is not knowing my initial bodyfat. So if anyone asks me - i'll tell them most important thing is to know where your bodyfat is, esp if they are sedentary mature adults who haven't remained athletic.

My waist at the mo is quite close to 34" now, and I think if i came off creatine, i'd lose an inch and a half just from that water retention. But that's neither here nor there.

So to answer your question, the reason I was so fat initially. I just didn't know exactly how fat I was. It's not easy to tell the difference between 24% and 20%. Nor from 20% and 17%. In fact above 15% it's not easy to pin down where you are. You only find out how deep the rabbit hole goes when you start cutting and seeing where you are at. If only I had got a DEXA at some stage, I would have known I was way off with my bodyfat estimates. But because I used tables, and caliper measurements, I never came close to finding a true estimate.

The other thing is vag, I say i might be over 20% because that's being conservative. But i might even be as low as 17%, even though I don't believe that to be true. I can't know for sure either way until i've finished cutting to 15%. And then working backwards I will be able to tell you what bodyfat I was when I weighed 83kg. But right now, there is an uncertainty due to the lack of precision in visual estimating bodyfat above 15%.