Bench Sep 29

Pretty straight forward bench day, no PR's or anything but solid training.

Triples at 45, 95, 115, 135, 155, 190, 230

Capped my max set at 8 reps for 245

Triples at 260, 270, 280

High Incline DB Press

2 x 15 at 50's, 70's

T-bar Angled Machine Row - For these I would row to my chest, stick it there for a slow 3-count and then lower it slowly.

3 x 10 @ 45, 70, 90

No idea what the actual mechanism weighs without weights on it, doesn't matter a lot.

HIIT can be miserable, but damned if Muse doesn't make it a lot better

September 27 Evening HIIT

20 mins of John Meadows 45/15 protocol on airdyne. Workout data was 256 calories, approx 4 miles travelled. Finished with a three minute cooldown alternating between upper only and lower only every 30s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej8rdi-cwdw&feature=youtube_gdata_player

September 27 Log Pressing

I'm definitely becoming a bit more competent with the log, though I've still got a long way to go. Damn training has been so touch and go lately between the wedding, moving and preparing for my black belt grading at the end of October. I'm going to try using my girevoy sport belt next time instead of my powerlifting belt. It doesn't allow for the kind of mobility required to set and clean the log. I see now why a lot of strongman competitors wear the big thick polypropolene belts instead of powerlifting belts for the atlas stone and log pressing events.

Warm-ups with barbell

2 x 10 @ 45, 2 x 10 @ 65

Strict Press with Log

6 @ 100
6 @ 120
4, 5, 4, 4, 4 @ 140

The second set felt way better than the others, though it still sucked. I think the clean was better - still trying to get used to the idea of flaring my elbows when I clean like in the EFS instructional videos.

3 Sets of Pull-ups

10 Underhand
10 Neutral
10 Angled

September 25th - Horrible Box Squats, Pretty Good Rowing

Squats were awful today. Even 185 felt heavy... 315 felt like a house on my back. I still did a triple but I was feeling headachey and slow, hope I'm not coming down with something. I actually had a pretty good sleep last night.

Triples @ 45, 95, 135, 185, 225, 275, 295, 315

I decided that I'd be playing with fire if I kept going with squats with little chance of a real reward so I skipped to the conditioning I had planned.

10 Minutes 30/30 HIIT on Concept 2

I used the calories/hour function as an intensity indicator, trying to keep it above 1600 during the work intervals. I had a couple of dips in the later rounds but I think those were mainly because of slower eccentric phases and awkward catches as a result. In the opening 15 seconds of each interval I was actually breaking 2000 in the early rounds, 1800-1900 in the later.

September 17 HIIT

I did some HIIT with two machines in my store today - one is a summit trainer made by Superweigh SEG and the other is a commercial airdyne I sell. First I did John Meadows' preferred protocol of 45 seconds steady with no resistance followed by 15 seconds of OH GOD A BEAR IS CHASING ME AND IT HAS A GUN with the maximum resistance. I did that for 20 minutes on the summit trainer. Because it's on an incline and uses a "Driving down and back" motion it hits the glutes and hips very nicely. By the end of the 20 minute period I'd done 2.3 miles on the 25 degree slant. Obviously this has exactly no correlation to how much real ground I would've covered, but the point is to try to beat that next time.

After that I did five minutes of 30/30 on the airdyne, standing upper-body only. I take the seat all the way out so I can stand over it with a wide enough stance that the pedals don't touch me. If you really try to rip on it as hard as you can during the work intervals then it's surprisingly hard on the abs and obliques, since they're responsible for slowing, then reversing the momentum each time the handles reach their end ranges. I find it to be great pre-hab correlation for BJJ, since the majority of abdominal and lower back injuries in BJJ occur while either trying to generate rotational force, or resisting it.

Cardio machines aren't typically my first choice for conditioning but they do have their place and they do make the training easily trackable and programmable, which I like. As long as it's a machine that is set up to hit large, strong muscle groups in compound ranges of motion at high intensity with comfortable ergonomics then it works great. Concept 2 rowers are very, very good but an airdyne is a great choice for a BJJ school since it's so compact.

I'm married!!!

The reason I've fallen off the blogging wagon is that on September 14th, I made my amazing fiance my wife. Surrounded by friends and family, we said our vows to each other at the citadel theater, then had our reception at the Ramada inn. I really cannot describe how happy I am. To have found someone that understands, supports and loves me as much as she does is a blessing, and also a lesson.

Before Stephanie, pretty much all of my girlfriends had fallen into my lap in some way or another. I started dating when I was about 12 and at the time I was swimming ten times a week at two hours a shot. On top of that I had dryland training consisting of a steady diet of running and weightlifting. My weekends were usually meets, many out of town and even the ones that weren't would start with a 7 am saturday morning practice followed by hill sprints. This complete lack of spare time meant that pretty much all relationships happened within the club, usually after a slow burn from so much consistent exposure to one another. Being teenagers there never really was much mystery to it. Everyone knew everyone and if two people were attracted enough to one another to consider a relationship then it never surprised anyone when it finally became official. I never had to go out and try to meet random people, to put myself out there and play the game like other people.

It didn't change as I aged, either. I decided on massage therapy as a career before I graduated high school and didn't take any breaks between grade 12 and my first semester at the Somatics Institute. I quit swimming when I was 15 but immediately took up kettlebell training, Ketto Ryu Ju-Jutsu and Kyokushin Karate to feed my passion for athletics and fill the massive holes in my schedule left by swimming. Again, all of my dating ventures were born from people inside my comfy social circle, people who were around me all the time for other reasons, got to know the real me and the attraction grew naturally until we both acknowledged it. I left Ketto Ryu and Karate for BJJ and Muay Thai, massage therapy for the fitness sales industry, but still, nothing changed. Whether the relationships were short, long, successful or abysmal failures, they all started that way - the easy way.

Stephanie walked into my store one day, months after the end of what had been by far my most successful relationship. I was in a place where I was starting to think about dating again but no idea how to go about it. My best friend's wife (fiance at the time) had even taken it upon herself to create online dating profiles on my behalf. She walked into my store and turned my entire comfy world upside down. She was looking for a cheap doorway chin-up bar, but we ended up talking for about an hour. I was inundated with every cliche I've ever heard of - the butterflies, the stuttering, the clumsiness, everything. I knew I had to do something but I didn't know what, so I ended up taking her information for the chin-up bar, even though we don't really need it for such a cheap soft good purchase. After she left, I couldn't stop thinking about her. I called my co-manager Jessica, my brother, and my best friend even though I didn't really know anything about her. I spent the rest of the day grinning like an idiot.

I ended up calling her at work with the cheap and incredibly transparent excuse of seeing how her chin-up bar was working out for her. After a brief laugh when she told me she'd torn down her doorframe with it, I asked her out. She said she would call me back since she was at work, though I found out later it was because she needed to break it off with the guy she'd been seeing because she was secretly just as crazy about me as I was about her, and hoping I would call her. When I picked her up for our first date, I was nervous as hell, especially because I realized that I was 24 years old and had never done this before. This was the first time I'd had to fly blind in this situation, not knowing if she was attracted to me or not and knowing that I had no cushioning to fall back on, no history of not acting like a tool around her for her to refer to and realize that I wasn't being myself. I stood a very real chance of screwing this up, and if I did then it would be all on me.

That's the difference. I am who I am and Stephanie is who she is, and no matter how we met I have faith that we would have eventually gotten to this place together, but she was the first one I've felt like I had to go out and get myself if I wanted her. I had to dig deep into places I'd never explored within my emotional sense of self and learn the skills I'd never learned back when I was a teenager, when it didn't matter anyway because the relationships had no substance or basis in reality. It wasn't easy this time, but as soon as I saw her walk in the door I knew I would do anything.

Oh, and she's actually EXCITED about the idea of making our entire basement into a dungeon of Elite FTS equipment when we buy a house. Score.

Bench September 11

This was a good workout, actually. When I arrived at the garage I was feeling pretty good despite not having slept very well and decided today was the day I would work up to a heavy single. It turned out not to be the best idea, but I had a decent back-off set and then some great assistance work with the log.

fives at 45, 95, 115, 135, 155, 185, 205, 225

3 @ 240

Singles at 265, 275, 285, 295

The 295-300 mark has become an anytime weight for me ever since I broke the 315 plateau, the kind of weight that will still feel heavy but I know I can work up to even on a particularly high-gravity day. It serves as kind of an intensity indicator. How it feels will determine whether I go any heavier that day and today it went up, but it was very sluggish. I might have been able to go up to 300 or 305, but it wouldn't have been a PR anyway and would have carried a higher risk of injury. I figured under the circumstances it would be better to back off to 255 and get some volume in.

255 x 9

Strongman Log Cheat Curl and Strict Press

I absolutely love this movement as assistance for the bench press and as a supplement to BJJ. I've heard of it being utilized often in strongman but I wasn't crazy about doing it with dumbbells or the barbell variations of it. Now that I have the log and tried it I'm hooked.

3 x 12 @ 90lbs - first set with the wide handles, second and third with the narrow handles. I didn't add any weight since it was my first try at it and wasn't sure if it would cause any tendonitis flare-ups, but I felt great afterward and since. I'm going to try adding weight next time, but definitely going to keep it above ten reps for now.

Once I got to work, I did three sets of band pull-aparts with a 50lb resistance tube.

Box Squats September 9th

Today's workout was pretty exciting, didn't do 5/3/1 programming but just put in some volume and tested the waters with some heavy-ish weight. My neck is feeling better, especially with a low bar position but I have to be very careful to maintain a tight arch, even more so than usual. As soon as I start to pitch forward even a little bit as the weight gets heavy it starts to get painful.

Triples at 45, 95, 135, 185, 225, 275, 315, 335

Singles at 355, 370

Back-off set of 12 at 275

Three sets of hanging knees-to-elbows

A Perspective on Isolation Exercises for BJJ

If you've read Part 1 of my series "Functional Strength - Are You Missing the Point?" then you've already had a taste of how I feel about the current state of "functional fitness" and what an under-educated, misrepresented circus it is quickly becoming. I've spoken to crossfitters that have breathlessly explained to me that the only way to achieve any respectable level of fitness is to do 5-7 random WODS a week with 110% intensity and no periodization at all. Then I listen to an interview with Crossfit Games contender Chris Spealer, in which he intelligently and articulately explains how he essentially does a west side split, with a weekly 5/3/1 squat day and work with an olympic lifting coach, while doing 2-3 metcon WODs a week for conditioning with assistance exercises to address his weaker muscle groups. How is it possible that both of these people think they're on the same team?

Anyway, one of the hot topics of debate is isolation movements, and whether or not they have a place in an athlete's program. The knee-jerk reaction of many functional training advocates will be "No, in fact for every bicep curl you do, an angel is hurled into a swirling abyss of spikes, fire and Nicki Minaj music" but bear with me for a moment. It is very true that in terms of training economy, compound multi-joint movements should take precedence over isolation exercises. My workouts have been very cramped lately, so my priority is getting my work done on the primary movement. I haven't had much time to do assistance work at all, let alone isolation work. That said, isolation does absolutely have a place in the preparation of a BJJ practitioner/competitor.

The major case against isolation is that simple, single-joint movements happen rarely if ever in a lifestyle/sport situation. Most of our athletic efforts outside the weight room are full-body, so of course compound movements like squats, deadlifts, pull-ups etc should have better carryover. The thing is though... we actually do have isolation movements in our sport. They're called submissions, specifically joint locks. The techniques used by bodybuilders to promote sarcoplasmic hypertrophy in a given muscle group are designed to remove as many other large, strong muscle groups from the equation as possible and focus a high degree of force at a single joint. If that sounds familiar, it's because that's exactly what the joint-locking techniques of BJJ are designed to do. With this in mind, isolation exercises alongside a joint mobility practice should start to make more sense from an injury prevention perspective. It honestly doesn't have to be a lot. You could throw a few sets of curls, lateral raises, skullcrushers, rear delt flies, external rotations, hamstring curls and other isolation movements into scattered workouts over a course of months, or just hit them all in a row with some theraband tubing as a prehab circuit you do before or after training. What I will tell you is that when the inevitable happens and you let an armbar go a little too far while drilling, having thickened the tendonous attachments with a bit of special attention can mean the difference between shaking it off and continuing, or being off the mats for a week.

This isn't just for BJJ, either. In a recent EliteFTS article, professional strongman competitors were asked if they were only allowed five gym exercises, which ones they would choose. Three of them included curls, and all for exactly the same reason - when you do curls, you tear your biceps less often. No matter the sport, when you take a look at the common injuries you'll see a similar pattern - that the injury occurred when a particular joint or muscle which is usually supported by other larger muscle groups was placed in a situation where it had to fend for itself and failed to do so. The difference in our sport is that instead of a chance occurrence, the situation is being planned and engineered by a human being. A quarterback may go several years throwing a football the same way until the one day he takes a funny step while doing so and strains his bicep tendon, but if on a weekly basis you're having your joints twisted and bent on purpose, it becomes just short of inevitable. You need to be prepared. Nobody is talking about performance implications - you aren't going to try to curl your way out of the armbar or prioritize machine leg extensions over squats. If this article is used as an excuse for that then we'll have to have an unpleasant conversation. I'm simply saying that if you add just a bit of isolation work to your routine along with regular joint mobility practice, you have a better chance of not missing mat time and that's worth sucking it up.

Log Pressing September 4, 2013

Today was the first day I got to play with my new Xtreme Monkey strongman log. I was planning on doing a baseline wave of 10's, 8's, 6's and 4's but it looks like I'm going to have to do more practice before I can put any relevant numbers on the board. I figured years of kettlebell pressing experience would have somewhat prepared me for log pressing but it turns out that log pressing is truly unique. I also haven't decided if the 5/3/1 log pressing day is going to be strict pressing or push pressing, or if I'm going to clean every time, or press it out of the rack. So many possibilities!

Anyway, the log itself apparently weighs 90lbs. Feels like a lot more than that right now.

90 x 10
110 x 10
140 x 1 (pressed it pretty easily but wobbled at the top and had to put it down... didn't feel good for the neck)
130 x 6 (felt WAY heavier than 130lbs should. Ego officially out the window)
110 x 10
90 x 10

Afterward I felt a very healthy pump in... well, the upper body. The whole thing. Everywhere. I can't believe how strong the upper back and traps on pro strongman must be to be able to keep the log stuck to the chest as they clean it when the thing weighs over 300lbs.

Afterward we loaded it into the power cage and did some floor pressing with it.

90 x 10
110 x 10
140 x 10
180 x 10

These were pretty smooth but still pumped up the triceps like crazy. I love this thing!

Video coming soon.