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Nice work with all the PRs. Hopefully you can maintain the majority of your strength now on the cut.

Thanks mate. I don't anticipate i'll have a problem maintaining, if anything i'm going to do better than that and actually improve my lifts. I was going so well til that friday with coach and it just threw me off the rails trying out his way. Before then I was adding 2kg a workout without a stall. I don't blame him or regret it -- i learnt a lot -- even thru trial and error during that time -- but i've just ended up going back to the way I was squatting before I met him and my form is much better and cleaner now and I feel confident I can add a lot more weight with my newly acquired muscle mass.

You've been doing awesome man!

Don't be down on yourself. Yeah you might have issues here and there but in all, you're doing really well.

Thank you! I'm really hard on myself I know, sometimes it's just venting but I do feel as though my gains have been less than I wanted. Still they're good. I'll recap them when I get a chance. Having said all that, I squatted a milestone of 3 plates today for reps without a belt, highbar without form breakdown. It feels good man!

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Progress Summary



So my back squat went up some 40kg and my FS went up around 16kg. It's interesting that my FS went up without my doing any FS specific work. I just did a heavy triple before my backsquats and my backsquats pretty much drove my FS up with minimal FS volume. Pretty cool. I think it's true what they say that the BS is the superior leg exercise, it just does so much all at once. I believe I got the best out of both worlds by doing both exercises though. Before I started focusing on BS my FS was pretty much stuck. BS got it unstuck and and stayed unstuck until my BS stuck in which case my FS also got stuck lol.

I kinda regret all the time I spent doing a shitload of FS before that, it was hard work and I was struggling to edge my FS up ever so slightly by doing FS alone. Yet with BS my FS was able to progress smoothly up to 3x128 and 3Fx129. I wish I had tripled 130kg but because my BS got stuck I couldn't get that last 2 kilos.

Okay now where do we grow from here? It's quite simple. I'm about 15kg overweight right now. For every kilo I remove from my waist, i'm sticking that on the bar. So by the end of my cut my goals are quite simple - 140kg -- BS 6x140kg and FS 3x140kg. I will continue to focus on BS while working up to 6x140kg. That will be my first goal. My expecation is that this will get my FS unstuck and take me up to around 3x135kg. From there having achieved the BS goal, i'll turn my attention to FS and work my ass off adding the next 5kg to triple 140kg.

I'm kind of sick of the way I am training. It doesnt' get my dick hard. I need to figure out a way to take less of a toll on my CNS. Might have to find a better way to program my lifts. Might make a thread and ask for help.

While cutting i'm going to transition back to basketball skill training and conditioning. Will do this very slowly. 1-2 sessions of conditioning after lifting. Alternating HIIT and steady state. 

Summarising the goal for the coming cut - lose 15kg of bodyweight, gain fitness and conditioning and for strength add every kilo lost from BW to the bar. Get HBBS 6x140kg and FS 3x140kg. If i get those three things done, i'll have big visible abs, top conditioning, double bodyweight squats (FS and BS) and decent athleticism (vertical and short sprints).

Maybe we should all be doing deadlifts. Lol.

Nice. That video should be in the beautiful squats thread! Coach taught me a similar method of squatting even down to the head jerk seen on the ascent, his reasoning was if you look down your body follows your head and then you end up turning it into a good morning. So to remain upright look up and your body will follow your head. I am paraphrasing him. Those guys have short femurs makes theirs squats so pretty and upright. I think if i break my knees first, it gives me more room to pack my long femurs into. If I don't do that, they force my hips wayyy back. Getting the romaloes in approx 2 weeks time, for my birthday.

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edit, so i re-read and rewatched the video later and I see what you mean by knee action both outward and forward. Interesting. That's another thing to experiment with (the outward). I'll def try that on thh technique sets on friday. Thanks man!

vag, acole, yes i'm getting PRs but not the ones i'd like. ie, getting BS 3x133 when i wanted 5. And FS 3Fx129 when I wanted all 3 reps. But yes PRs are still PRs, just not all PRs are worth the same. The main thing which threw me off is when I got into the 130kgs and switching over to using 2x15kg plates instead of a lot of smaller plates (~30kg worth) i'd been using til then, i just lost my groove. The weight feels too heavy now. The lifts are a lot harder. I bet if i had a 3rd pair of 5kg plates i'd not have got stuck and actually reached my goal of 5x140kg. Fucking sucks but it's okay, i might still be able to triple 140kg by friday.

LBBS and seifuallah, no i can gain weight, i just dont gain as much lean mass as i'd like. I get, got fatter than i'd like. it sucks, but whatevers. At that point i made that comment, I wasn't able or willing  to eat a lot more to keep gainining weight (hit a setpoint or something?) and i was remarking that i had been eating enough to gain weight til then, just not seeing the muscular gains id like. But this is not very relevant right now considering i'm 2 sessions away from finishing up the current mass accumulation phase.

Training
FS 2x129 (PR)
BS 3x134 (PR), 3x127, 3x120
FS 3x112.5, 1x112.5 (done with block under heels)
BS 8x115 (PR, w/ form change)
BP 4x88 (PR), 8x81 (PR)
WEIGHTED DUNKZ X2 (MAX EFFORT LOL)

FS notes:
Ok. Will go for a triple on monday.

BS notes:
Blah. Had zero bounce, had to quad-drive every single rep including warmups. Hips and PC chain are on holiday, quads are being overworked.

BP notes:
For the first time the 1RM calc puts me over 100kg! (=101kg) with that 8x81kg set. I am better at higher reps though but I do think i'm actually there, that has been a long time goal.

Jumps:
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIFzho_u59Y" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIFzho_u59Y</a>

It's been over 2 wks since I tried dunking. LOLZ ive gotten so overweight that it takes max effort to land a dunk. I missed 8/10 attempts before finally getting 2 dunks on my 9th and 10th attempt. Relative strength is terrrrrrible right now. I came home and weighed myself to be just under 91kg. That's nuts, like being 16kg overweight from my TFmax as per Zatsiorsky.

Btw dunk above felt like how it felt when I first got a proper dunk, you know, when it takes all your will to land one and otherwise you would miss. Very reminiscent of that first time.

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So think that kind of sums it up, time to end this thing. Yes it's a week earlier, but I don't see any point in going any further when i've stalled hard. Time to stop cultivating mass and start harvesting! Will summarise my gainz in a seperate post.

I haven't back squatted since 2012 because of the same reason. I ruined my lower back from doing high rep back squats. I didn't even go that heavy my PR was like 90kg for 15 reps but I'm 100% sure that high rep back squats along with physically demanding jobs last year was what fuked up my lower back.

Thing I am finding with those higher rep sets is you have the temptation to reach a milestone (say 8 reps) and you'll do the 7th, know that the 8th will be ugly/uncontrolled and have to make the choice whether to go ahead and get the PR or rack the bar. And of course you don't want to be a pussy, so you go ahead and do the rep, even with shit form. And that way you can write PR on your log, but is it the right thing? I would think not. Better to keep a rep in the tank, and do it safely and perfectly. But much harder to make that choice when the seductive prospect of a PR lingers. If i was training someone else, I would tell them to do perfect reps only and rack the bar if you know the next rep won't be technically correct. But i can't follow my own advice because i'm so focused on getting to my milestone goal.

Quote from: entropy on August 23, 2013, 12:50:19 am

Feeling disillusioned with backsquat. It's clearly the superior exercise for all those wonderful reasons that are well known. But on the downside, i'm finding it a terrible exercise for my lower back. It puts so much torque on my LB that I can barely walk properly most days. I have to struggle getting up from a chair. It hobbles me up. Question is, is it because the backsquat is too hard on my back. Or is my back too weak to backsquat? Or maybe I'm backsquatting too heavy too often. I dont understand what's going on. The lower back discomfort I have is asymmetric, it occurs on the left side only.

If I make all my PRs today then I might consider doing another week. Otherwise, i'll start cutting on monday!

Maybe it's not the actual back squat itself but rather the manner in which you do it? Or, you may have some issues with the left or right side of your body (tighness, weakness, etc) that place more stress there when back squatting. I know the BS has hurt my lower back before but I learned this was due to an excessive arch (anterior tilt) and also knee and ankle issues on one side of my body. If you are feeling the pain (force) in your lower back then there's obviously something breaking down in the chain.

Then again, maybe it's just not for you. Have you noticed the same thing when you have squatted with a wider or more narrow stance or different bar position?

Oh for sure. I have problems with symmetry, always have. Have been working hard on correcting the asymmetry. I remember when I was doing planks last year, i found my R side of my torso was much stronger and the L got tired faster for some reason even though my L side is my strong side. So it's def possible that my L side core strength is only now being dragged, kicking and screaming to parity. But I doubt it. I think I just end up putting more torque on the left side of my back when backsquatting.

Might go down to the shops and get some dencorub, when I used to backsquat a lot, i remember it being useful for making my back feel better.

As far as technique goes, my plan now is to get Nike weightlifting shoes for my birthday which have a 0.75" heel, which will help me be more upright. Hopefully that takes torque off the back. The more upright and highbar my squat, the better it is for my back and more useful an exercise for athleticism because it puts more of the work onto the legs and buttocks rather than the erectors and the spine.

Lol. I still have no idea who was at fault but yeah that's summarising things the way they happened. The chinese guys for not communicating better with the judges? The stuff they sniff before lifting is ammonia. It fires up the CNS, makes the athlete alert etc. I don't remember seeing any top athletes use it. From what I understand, the olympic weightlifter wants to be fully relaxed and in control of himself and not highly amped up and aroused because their job is so technical. Traditionally used by powerlifters since they don't require so much technique and it's more about brute strength.