His reasoning for squat jumps (not jump squats) which are unweighted squats into a jump is to teach my body to recruit the quads out of the hole. I'm not doing the plyo exercise you guys use with a barbell, which to my understanding is an advanced exercise. Too strong a back means giving up finishing a squat with the legs allowing the back to take over (squat morning) when legs aren't strong enough or just lazy legs giving up too easily. btw he's totally right about my quads being weak as fuck. I had a solid convincing reason for that but now i've forgotten it for the moment, will edit when i remember.
In case anyone is interested, this is the program/plan coach sketched for me :-
I'm not yet doing 100% what's written, just because I want to finish what I started first. But also because I can't do some of those things right now due to injury and what not. But eventually I will do it as written.
What do you guys think btw? Is he mad? Good? Bad? A lot of it resonates with what Lance has told me along the way and I respect his views quite a lot.
BS notes: I said i'd go for 6x126 topset but I thought i might try my luck with with progressing heavy 5s for a while. Smashed it. I mean it was very hard but I bore full control over the weight thru the whole set. And last time I only got 4 reps with 127.5kg which weren't controlled so having take a 2kg jump i'm pretty pleased with the way the set went! If they keep moving at 2kg that's equally fantastic. I can leave 6s for the 2nd set, which will go up 1kg at a time after getting a new 6PR. Didn't have a 6th in me today though for whatever reason. So attempt 6x126kg on friday. Oh and i've decided the 3rd set will be 120kg for reps, hopefully 8 next time, and work my way up towards 10 reps. This way I get nice load of volume with a heavier set, while continuing to progress towards 10x120kg which corresponds to the cycle training goal of a 160kg max.
I improved my HBBS form today. I actively balanced the bar not just midfoot (after coach's advice) but also laterally btw my legs distributing it equally over both feet. This made a profound difefrence, the bar looked very straight and balanced on video which is new. I think if my floor was even the effect would be even more pronounced. This is a worthy improvement!
OHP notes: I was kinda spent after today's squats. Not making an excuse, just think if I were fresher I would have got the triple PR w/ 67kg. All good. Heavy doubles aint so bad but they were bit too hard for my liking after how easy I got the 3x65kg PR last week. Next time.
Hip Thrust: Lol so tried these for the first time. I kinda suck. 60kg was challenging on that first set lol. What didn't help was my bench would tilt over at the top of the rep. So have to figure out a way to stop that. Think I found one for set 2 onwards put wood blocks under the bench legs so it stays in place. Rather uncomfortable to have bar dig in on my pelvic region, but i'll adapt I guess. I think i'm currently limited mostly by pain threshold than I am by strenf on these. Once my bones adapt to the stress then I'll be able to comfortably load some decent weight on this probably. I looked at Raptors log and he's only using like 90kg for this and he's been doing the exercise foreever .. so i guess I can't be too bad in the glute area? Dunno. Whatever lets see what happens over the next few weeks. If it carries over onto my squats i'll know instantly cause my squat (topset) is very challenging and i'll know if HT work have made them easier.
Coach wants me to do hip thrusts but i'm focusing so hard on squats that I dunno if I can spare the recovery/effort for accessories rite now. But I should at least start them I guess :/ He also wants me to do a lot of quad power exercises which i'll begin when my achilles tendinitis dissipates completely.
I'm trying to figure out my sizing for nike romaleos 2. I tried out nike free's in 13 and 11.5 which were obviously wrong. Also tried out 12s and 12.5s. Hard to decide between 12 and 12.5. 12's are snug. 12.5's are slightly roomy. So not sure which to go with out of those two. If I wear 2 pairs of socks i'll def need 12.5s (been doing that because i thought my right foot ankle mobility is jelly like).
Haha. I know you were joking but her snatch form is too western if you know what i mean. Her back is arched really hard (to a fault, hyperextension). Her clean is nicer she pulls with a flat back but her catch sucks like her snatch. Plus her elbows are too pointy.
Suggested guidelines: Only pretty, technically and aesthetically pleasing squats. Please no grindy, ugly lifts, no PL squats, no DLs, bps, etc. Only squats (and maybe snatches and c&js)
Training FS 3Fx127 (PR), 3x126 (PR) BS 4x127.5 (PR), 5x125(PR), 10x110 (PR) BP 5x86 (PR), 1x87
FS notes: I didn't FS on friday, wanted to make up for it by adding 2kg instead of the usual 1kg. Didn't get the 3rd rep but on the 2nd set got 3x126 I would have done on friday. Body is able to produce 1kg PRs a pop (3kg a week) but no more than 1kg at a time. Noted. Really dirty 3rd rep on the 126kg. If I posted the vid you'd all rightly chastise me. I reason that if I had not attempted a 127kg triple before that it would have been cleaner. Upper back rounded a lot, lower back was ok. Have to strengthen upper back. And yes coach would say it's because your quads are not strong enough, totally true, stronger quads mean you can get away with less upper back strength by driving the rep hard but since i'm already working very hard on quads there isn't much I can do about that but upper back can be strengthened via other exercises.
BS notes: I kinda figured out a way to make my normal technique more quad centric. Just by re-oriented myself on the way up to drive straight up via quads. Bad news is I didn't have my 6 reps in me for 127.5 - my thought was to continue from friday's 6x127 ugly squatmornings to give myself motivation by getting a 1/2kg PR. But really I should have done 126kg or something instead since the 127kg last week was too dirty for any use. So. Next time go for 6x126kg topset and then resume 2kg jumps from there. Also that 6x126kg will be a PR set - i'm not counting fridays squat mornings with coach as backsquat - they were good mornings!
Also for next time consciously tighten up adductors. Just to get more stability into the hole. It's one thing I can do to reduce the horizontal instability that comes with my narrow stance.
Happy to get the 10x110kg milestone PR - 1RM calculator puts that as a 147kg max, which is close to 150kg = 2xbw for my ideal bw of 75kg. So that's something i guess. I would like 10x120kg just to make sure I have really covered the 2xbw goal, or at least mean it's a smooth athletic lift rather than a slow grindy one.
BP notes: Think i've hit the wall on 6s. Have got as far as these could take me. Now I will try 5s for a while. If that gets me unstuck up to 90kg it will be great. So subtle changes are the way forward. I'll make that the watchword of the day. Slowly and gradually i'll improve my form but in the meantime stick to the program and get my 140kg squats (FS 3x140 and BS 6x140) in the next 3 weeks. If I fall 5kg short on FS that's ok. If I can't get 6 reps of BS - that's ok too, 5 will do. I may switch to 5s for my topset if necessity deems it so.Then come september, i'll start dropping bodyfat back to baseline. Work tirelessly on my form, slowly and steadily widening stance, getting more upright, maintaining depth. Add in accessory work and close up any strength and muscle gaps in my kinetic chain. Become a beast.
1 or 2 inches? Come on man, it's an inches game. Nice work. Have you tried doing any banded kb/plate swings and then jumping? The one time i tried, it gave me a coupla inches immediately.
If I could back and not see coach on friday, i probably would lol and continue thinking I was on the right track. Haha. But i srsly i didn't believe that proper squatters must have such a stance so much wider than mine. I had to see it from his eyes to realise it and then it just hit me like a ton of bricks. Watch Михаил Кокляев
That's a wide as stance! Or is it? The inside of his shoes up near the heel are pretty much shoulder width. He's still hitting good depth and staying upright. I'm also noticing how wide his grip is on the bar, i should experiment with mine too instead of just taking it on faith that close as possible best (mine is very very close).
Over the weekend i practiced a lot with the empty bar. Shoulder Width (SW) stance, slightly wider, more wider, toes straight, toes turned out a little, more, with plates under feet, etc. I found that I couldn't do my usual ATG on front squats with a wider stance, for some reason i run into huge buttwink issues, back rounds completely just after breaking parallel. This was paradoxical to me why with a narrow stance I can keep a flat back and go proper deep and with a wider stance it becomes close to impossible. I obviously haven't got the mobility to squat properly with a SW stance right now, and if i switch over to it immediately i'll likely get injured. So that's what I won't do. I may gradually increase my stance, hopefully while preserving depth and get stronger over time.
Here is a mindfuck though. With a SW stance, I can do a perfectly deep, upright OHS!! How can you explain that? I have no idea. It must be my hamstrings/hips tightening up on FS/BS which doesn't happen in OHS? I found I need to tighten up my groin muscles to keep a flat back on BS. Wider stance brings a whole host of issues with it, it's no wonder I came to prefer narrow.
I have picked up some injuries since wednesday. I wore my worst pair of shoes on my postworkout cooldown run/jog and they have given me a nasty dose of Achilles tendinitis. It flared up on friday and coach had me do some stretches and rolling but i think that just made it worse. It wasn't something to stretch away but needed to be rested. You never know about these things, some niggles go away from working at them, some get worse. I also think my lowerback didn't like the heavy good mornings i did with coaches technique. His squat technique leads to way more squatmorning than my usual method. It also hurt my right knee. I completely believe that his way is more quad dominant.
I measured my thighs and was surprised to find them come out as 25" - that was my goal size. So now i'm thinking with my FS+BS combo and everpresent quad soreness, i was on the right track, perhaps suboptimally and didn't really need to make drastic changes. By veering off course, i just caused myself unnecessary stress and possibly injury! So small subtle changes from here on, back to way things were on my last good workout (wednesday). nothing drastic, just incremental small improvements from here. Yes I need a wider stance. No I wont go all the way to SW right away.
Everyone has that problem when cutting, it's harder to sleep esp if hours pass since your last meal. Solution is to eat your dinner later close to bedtime and make it a big meal, with a decent amount of fibre, protein and carbs. fibre and protein for fullness, carbs because sleep quality improves. Also consider taking supplements which reduce appetite if you find yourself unable to sleep. I like vitamin c and taurine to kill appetite at a pinch when sleepless.
Did you get Romaleos 1 or 2? How are they? I'm looking at a review of the 2 and they say the midfoot strap is a bit long and it can drag under the foot.
Is it small? Look at the pic! And it's not just the difference in foot width, it's what it means for the lift. Like right now if I do a BW squat, narrow stance and auch knees, dont feel it in the muscles. SW stance, and boom, instantly quads feel it. It solves a whole host of probs ive had where I don't come out upright from the bottom position. I overlooked it til now because coach told me and also because in the past where my power rack was situation I couldn't take a video from the appropriate angle which would have shown it to be a wrong stance. But so many things are now starting to make sense. I had bigger thighs last summer because then I was doing normal stance. I added 30kg to my squats since then and yet my quads are smaller .. didn't make sense. And after re-starting backsquat after my injury i favoured a wider stance to keep my hips healthy, well what do you know, suddenly i was getting epic quad soreness all the time. Which I never had from a shitload of front squatting. All these things are explained by stance.
Wow nice overreaction there. Calm down man. I wasn't seriously suggesting you are the reason. Clearly I was being flippant. But i'm also pretty sure that I read it in one of your posts this connection btw narrow stance and athletic. But that's not the reason I switched over to it. I used to do wider (=read normal) stance squats til October when I experimented with narrowing stance. This allowed me to go deeper and it gave me better leverage making the lift much easier, esp with front squats I found I could hit ATG. So it seemed right. And i stuck with it. But I was just cheating myself into thinking it was better. Actually it took work away from teh quads which is the whole point of squatting. I also don't think it's sustainable long term cause it's an inherently unstable position out of the bottom.
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Now I remember reading somewhere Lance writing that guys with longer legs need wider stance. But I thought that was just cheating for the sake of moving more weight and sacrificing depth by an excuse of height.
So in your paranoia you thought Lance was secretly recommending a wider stance so that you cheat yourself from getting stronger?
No you fool it was I who was cheating myself thinking depth was better when it's not. Narrow stance gave greater epth while wider stance has less depth. It's the flip side around, people make a big deal about more depth being better and less depth is cheating yourself whereas for me it turned out exactly the opposite way. The shallower lift is harder much harder.
I did wider stance til October. From october to April I did narrow. And then I hurt my hips (easy to do with narrow stance) and switched to wider stance til late june. Then switched back to narrow and pushed both of my squats all thru july. Now i'm going to revert to a wider stance and make it work. But already I can see it's so much easier to stay upright and drive up with the quads.
Also it's not 'overanalyzing over small detail'! super narrow stance vs normal stance is a huge deal. Instead of making my quads bigger and stronger, by adopting a narrow stance I made it an exercise for the extensors and the glutes!! Is it a minor detail that I turned a mainly quad exercise into a glute one? No! This means the last year of training was wasted! I'd have got more out of doing half squats lol. That's what it basically means. (And yes vag you made the point in my log about 6 weeks ago but i was seduced by ATG depth)
So for some reason (I am going to blame Raptor because i'm sure i picked it up from him) along the way I had decided an 'athletic squat' had a narrow stance than normal and that I should keep a narrow stance to make my gym gains carry over. The problem is my idea of normal was not. When coach took my stance (he's a lot shorter than me) by placing his feet over the plates he had me put under my heel he said, this is much to narrow even for me. But at the time I thought he just didn't understand that i want an athletic squat brah. Then I saw the video and instantly I saw what he saw - my stance was ridiculously narrow. Then as I thought about it some more, I realised coach was right and this isn't a powerlifter cheating on depth - it's an olympic lifter/coach taught by a national chinese coach who is telling me my stance is too narrow. I argued with him at the time saying, 'but it's athletic' and he said yes but, we're not doing squats to emulate a jump, we're doing them to get strong and grow big legs (paraphrasing). He's right ofcourse :-
Now I remember reading somewhere Lance writing that guys with longer legs need wider stance. But I thought that was just cheating for the sake of moving more weight and sacrificing depth by an excuse of height. That the true exercise was a narrow so called athletic stance. Incidentally Kelly starett calls an athletic stance as 'just wider than shoulder width' - which is my after position above. Which seem waaaay wide to me when I take the position and yet that's actually what he'd call athletic.
There are many other things we went thru with coach but this one is the one which i'm going to fix first. What i'm finding is that it's easier to stay upright now. But my depth isn't so good. But one other thing which really changes from stance is my hips are open now. Try opening hips with my old stance - it wasn't that easy lol. So maybe once i've adjusted to this new stance, i'll strengthen the hips and get more muscle contrib from other muscle groups and become stronger for it. Coach's all about the quad strength to the point of focusing on it exclusively. But i dont think it works for me honestly. My form was so shit, but i think that was partly because i insisted on my (very) narrow stance. So have to experiment and see whether his way can actually work for me because it didn't yesterday. His way makes for much worse squats than normal.
Oh and coach wasn't even interested in my front squats, he saw the video of 125kg triple PR from weds and told me how to improve but he didn't spend any time on it. I already know that i'll have to modify my stance though. And then i'll be more upright. And then i'll make my quads stronger. And then it will be a useful exercise, cause whatever i've been doing so far has been worthless, probably. Further experimenting with the new stance I just tried and got a perfect ATG overhead squat, balanced, controlled and deep. And on the concentric went straight up. Fuck this is awesome. I miss Lance
Dan describes in the accompanying article why he started squatting this way
Quote from: Dan Green
7. Good Mornings… The reason my squats would always top out around 600–for no less than 18 months—was that every time the weight got heavy enough, my butt would shoot up and I’d find myself doing good mornings! There was a simple fix: do more good mornings. I’d read Louie’s articles. In several instances he says that as many as 7 out of 10 Max Effort workouts would be good morning variations. All I had to do was start doing more good mornings! Where I’d gone wrong was identifying my back as the weak link. I’d assumed that my back wasn’t strong enough to squat heavier. I pretty much kept thinking that was the problem for the next 18 months!
8. Squatting is based on Posterior Chain Strength…Quads are just Ornaments!
I kept on training good mornings and I kept doing all the glute ham raises and posterior chain work that I could. But then something happened: I was fortunate enough in December 2010 to be invited to compete in Moscow. I squatted a respectable 617 in knee wraps, but then watched as Konstantin Pozdeev squatted 815…easily. I asked myself what it was that he had that I didn’t. He was a lighter 220 than me and outsquatted me by 200 pounds! But the difference was pretty obvious. He had nothing short of the most freakish quad development I’d ever seen!
Where I’d always squatted with a wide stance with my butt back, he stood more upright with a close stance and allowed his knees to travel way out in front of his feet. His knees would press inward as he reversed out of the hole—a major red flag for anybody who’d modeled their technique around the Westside technique. But again I was tempted. His quads draped themselves generously down over his kneecaps. Mine tapered off embarrassingly into the knee even though the upper portion was well developed. He had huge tear drop quads and I just had tears of sadness! His technique and quad development may have been freakish, but his astronomical squat world record spoke for itself! I had to make a change. If I kept squatting with my knees out and back and sitting my hips way back I was only going to scratch away and make modest PRs but I would never add 200 pounds if I didn’t overhaul my squat. I kept hearing Louie preach that quads were for bodybuilders. But then I couldn’t block the thought that: nope, Louie, quads were for world record squats!
No more than two months later I competed for the first time at the Raw Unity Meet and met some truly phenomenal raw lifters: Sam Byrd, Jeremy Hamilton and Jay Nera. What I was able to learn from these guys only went on to reinforce what I was starting to learn. And both Nera and Byrd had great squats, trained lots of front squats and seldom trained with maximal weights. They both had their own training styles, but both involved a lot of squatting!
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Work tirelessly on my form, slowly and steadily widening stance, getting more upright, maintaining depth. Add in accessory work and close up any strength and muscle gaps in my kinetic chain. Become a beast.
