Adarq.org

both squats look great man, nice work.

Means a lot. Thanks much!

Was on the dreadmill as usual punchin in my 30-40mins slow steady a day and the meter on the thing said I burned a whole 30 calories. That means it will take 6 months to burn a whole kilo of bodyfat. lol seems almost pointless. I'm hoping that figure is on the low end but realistically it's probably not far from the truth. Ah well, it's only one part of the bigger jigsaw so it's not a big deal.

I'm going to add a 4th workout a week. I like the heavy singles a lot, but if I abuse them i'll get weaker/overtrained/injured. So will do them only on fridays. Then to make up the volume i'll add an extra training day on the weekend, but i'll make sure to only train at 70% of 1RM. This should be nice and easy and will help perfect form as well, which I need to do.

Somehow training is just coming together now, before it was all a big mess with a lot of experimenting going on trying to find something that works - think that's behind me now thankfully.

Asymmetric soreness in lower body. Left glute and hamstring more than right. It's odd. It's kind of disturbing because it resembles my old chronic sciatica symptoms. I think it's because I haven't been jumping regularly, and now whenever I jump it bothers something. This happened earlier in the year too but as I was jumping and playing ball regularly, it went away and seems i've got that imbalance back from quitting basketball/jumping. I should do jumps regularly I think, even if they are submax, maybe throw them into workouts with a bit more frequency but little volume.

I had this dream last night that when I jump, I don't use both of my legs, and in the dream I used my right leg too and I was sailing over the rim dunking with ease. Was a cool dream, note to self think about jumping with both legs see if it helps lol.

were they running double-leg jumps? when i first started practicing them a lot i got asymmetrical soreness/aches because i always plant LR. left hip ended up feeling wonky. but it went away with time and i do enough bilateral stuff that i'm not worried about it.

Thank you. I don't do max running jumps on concrete, it's asking for ankle trouble. All I did were a few double leg SVJs. I get what you are saying though, if i was doing running jumps I do prefer to plant right leg first and then jump off left leg and it's important that to have ruled that out as the source of trouble since I didn't do any rvjs.

I think even in squats i'm left side dominant, not so much in front squats which are more symmetric but in backsquats. i have been working consciously on pushing with the right leg in backsquats because it's usually happy to just chill and go along for the ride given by the left leg. I might be unconsciously doing the same thing in jumping too. I wonder.

Last night I did my usual array of hip, glute and ham stretches which I do whenever i'm having problems. This morning I feel much better thankfully. I should probably do a few jumps regularly now to loosen up the imbalance and keep things nice and mobile. And regular stretches might not be a bad idea either, i tend to stop doing them when things feel good.

Feel weak today, i'm drinking water to try to hydrate better but think i might have to go get some gatorade from the shops. Have had about 2L of water so far. Will probably work out late tonight, i just wanna make sure im well hydrated first. Life is so much easier when you are downing a gallon of milk a day, would probably hydrate like a motherfucker with all that sodium, potassium, calcium, carbs and of course the gallon of fluid itself. But I can't drink much milk right now so will have to settle for sugar water instead.

Once i'm nice and lean i'll be able to handle a lot more calories without getting fat. This cut has really opened my eyes how over weight I was with respect to my lean mass. I had no business at all hitting ANY caloric surplus while weighing 85+kg - that was just a recipe for getting fat as fuck. But once i drop my weight down to a lean 10%, i'll have a better p-ratio and partioning of surpluses will better for mass gain. Realistically I shuda been around 73-75kg all along.

Thinking about front squats and athleticism and my experience with the lift so far. I think a good minimum for an athlete might be 1.5*BW - in fact that's probably too easy because a good athlete would be around 10-12% bodyfat and 1.5*BW isn't a big deal. But like I said minimum.

A 80kg athlete who is lean would need to front squat 120kg at a minimum, i'd say 140kg or 3 plates would be a decent front squat for a lean 80kg athlete. Incidentally 140kg is 1.75xBW which I have put down as my training goal for the medium term.

While i am around 80kg right now, that minimal goal of 120kg is just beyond my current reach annoyingly.  But i'm not a lean athlete, im a fat unathletic guy who happens to weigh an overfat 80kg. If I was 10-12% my bodyweight with my lean mass I would be around 74-77kg (guessing here) and that would mean a 1.5BW minimum front squat would be in the range 110-115kg, which I have done already. So if I keep my current maxes and diet down to ~75kg, i'd easily have a minimal 1.5BW front squat but because i'm overfat it counts against me because for my current weight the minimal front squat is just out of my reach.

It's interesting how good the front squat is in informing me about my (lack of) athleticism. I don't think 120kg is hard by any means for someone my bodyweight, it should be easy for someone who is a lean 80kg. That's why I call it minimum.

If I was to speculate - a great athlete would have an easy 2BW front squat. For someone lean and 80kg -  160kg sounds about right at a minimum and this goes up to 180kg for a 90kg athlete. A 90kg lean athlete would be a genetic beast though and 180kg would be nothing for such a person but a great long term goal for someone who wishes to be athletic..

Going forward supposing I finish the cut to 10% in the next 2-3 months and i'm then 75kg @ 10%, front squatting around 115-120kg. That's an easy 1.5bw going on 1.6bw. So not a bad place to start gaining athleticism (as opposed to shedding unathleticism by cutting bodyfat). So now i have great insulin sensitivity thanks to low bodyfat, i'm allowed to gain a solid 5kg of mass while staying at or below my max bodyweight limit of 80kg. I can train at a surplus as opposed to the deficit i've been on for the last 6-12 months. Gaining 20-25kg on my front squat while allowing up to 5kg weight gain seems like a sure bet. I mean if anything I'd say it should be fucking trivial really - challenging would be adding that 20kg to the bar while trying to stay under 77kg say.

The thing is though im not going to fall into the trap of gaining a lot of bodyweight quickly just to easily progress my lifts. Because it's utterly useless to me to gain 20-25kg on my squat if it means having gaining 5kg of fat. That doesn't help my athleticism in any way - and then getting rid of that extra fat would take a lot of cutting which i would rather avoid. I think my chances are good of being ~13% bodyfat if I do gain 5kg from 75kg to 80kg provided I gain them over a period of a few months rather than weeks. My main goal wont even be to gain mass - it's to become more athletic, ie to push the lifts up while staying lean. In future i will take a break from strength and athleticism and train purely for mass gain - i would like to be a lean 85kg one day and there is a place for mass specific training. But in the meantime, i'd prefer to be a maximally strong 77kg front squatting over 140kg than a fat 80kg @ 15% bodyfat with the same lifts.

Hey how come it seems like you are focusing on front squat rather than back squat?  Is it because you are more posterior chain dominant rather than quad?

Im just a much better front squatter and a poor backsquatter. I like front squats more than back squats. Both to perform and to watch. I have a bad sticking point with back squats which prevents me from doing them well with a lot of weight. When my form breaks down with backsquats with even moderate weights, its very dangerous and unsafe. I train alone and even with limit front squats I can fail safely without risking injury, just ride them down to the pins, no problems. With backsquats i'd get bent over it would put my back in a precarious position prone to injury, no thank you, esp when i've got a history of chronic sciatica behind me that I don't want to invoke anew.

The other thing is my fs and bs are very close together. Some people can handle a lot of weight on the back than front, i am not one of those. So I don't gain much from putting the bar on my back as opposed to on my chest. I lose some, form and safety, so the trade off just isn't there for me to focus on backsquats.

Lance thinks my backsquat turns itno a squat morning because i learnt to backsquat badly (hip driven) so front squat acts to remedy that tendency. I have found him to be right about this after focusing on front squats and seeing my squat mornings turn into nicer back squats.

Re pc dominant vs quads, honestly i have no clue. lance thinks i need more quad strength and i'm inclined to agree with him because i've noticed my quads not powering me out of the latter half of squats (both fs and bs). And my hamstring strength sucks for that matter, which is another reason i do backsquats - as an assistance exercise to help strenghten and build hamstrings & lower back. If i were to guess i'd say im very glute dominant, i power out of the hole easily.

did i mention i love front squats? lol. i think they're a purer exercise, a better test of athleticism. I've heard guys like Joe Defranco and the venerable yo elliot say the same thing so it must be true 

Training
FS 1x100, 4x93.5, 5x90
BS 3x90, 2x100, 3x105, 5x97.5, 6x95, 7x90
WCU 3x97.5 (+15kg), 2x100 (+17.5kg), 2x98.75 (+16.25kg), 1x102.5 (+20kg, PR!!!), 1x103.75 (+21.25kg PR!), 4x92.5 (+10kg), 4x90 (+7.5kg), 5x87.5 (+5kg), 5x85 (+2.5kg)

BW: 80kg

Decided to save myself for fridays front squats heavy singles so only did 3 sets of not heavy front squats. Finished with some backsquats which were not as good as I would have liked considering i wasn't exhausted from front squatting as usual.

FS notes:
Form sucked, didn't have a clue what I was doing today.

BS notes:
I started off well with the first warmup feeling very light on backsquats (probably cos i am a lot fresher than usual). But i'm really disappointed with backsquats. The depth just wasn't there today. I dont know why, i will repeat these sets next time.

Chins notes:
Got the +20kg chinup today, feels good man. Was 100% strict and not all that hard. I will probably start doing singles on this lift too. I reckon i am not far from 105kg w/ singles, and in a few months time I can expect to be close to my goal of 120kg chinups (+2x20kg plates).

Bring on friday, looking forward to doing front squat singles with 110kg!!

I like the front squat myself ( although i cant get it right , maybe now with lifting shoes ) , and i've also read that you get the form right ( which is the main problem ) its more 'functional' than back squat.
Having said that, the compare videos are terribly biased, you can't compare a submax 5-reps 200kg raw front squat with powerlifting meet sutied 350+ kg back squats.
Any day's video of your FS vs BS would be convincing and unbiased enough!