Friday, August 11, 2017

hypertrophy, week 7

- I am back in the land of high volume. On glute day I hit 8,000+ lbs of volume on back squat alone.

- I love how high volume has tested my discipline. I write almost all of my workouts down before I get to the gym, and I do my damnedest to stick to the plan. Sometimes I have to scale it back or improvise in the moment(if, say, I had a long day at work and I’m not feeling well), but I love the satisfaction I get from setting the bar and climbing to reach it. There are times when I am on my third or fourth set of squats and I try to con myself out of doing less reps on the ones to follow. I’ve grown to be quite good at telling that naysayer within to shut up though. I’m not really into selling myself short anymore.

- The loads are getting heavier, the lifts are getting harder, thus the DOMs(delayed onset muscle soreness aka hurting the day after the workout) are raging these days. I’m trying to stay consistent with my yoga/range of motion stretches, because it does help a lot. I need to foam roll more. Due to continuously overloading(progressive overload IS the key here) I find myself more tired and in need of more recovery post-lifting. I think I’m going to have to restructure my rest days vs working days to support the increasing workload.

- For squats, I switched from high bar to low bar. This means the bar placement on my back has changed from high(the bottom of my neck) to low (base of my traps). Instead of keeping my hands wide on the bar, I pin them in against my body, aiming my elbows down instead of winging out backwards. It took me a few sessions to get used to, but now I can’t imagine having my arms wide again. Keeping the arms pinned in helps me keep my chest up, and I can “pull” the barbell across my back and create a better “shelf” for the bar(think I used enough quotes?). Overall, it results in better form.

- I also end up like this when I pack my gym clothes in the dark of 5am:

at least I was kiiiiiiiiinda close

My bench press is finally climbling. I've been teetering around the same number on bench for nearly a year. In the winter I started over completely--I wanted to improve my form because it was fairly hideous. Hypertrophy work(lots of reps) has helped me lock in form and increase my confidence under the bar. That confidence is everything. Next thing to accomplish on bench: stop hesitating to ask someone for a spot. I need to push myself and I think not having a spotter keeps me in a comfort zone. No more comfort zone.

I'm going to purchase a food scale this month. I follow a fairly regimented diet and steer clear of junk. I'm a laissez-faire macro counter. The scale is going to help me keep better track--I'd like to bulk/increase my size a little. It's pretty much eggs/carbs for breakfast, rice, tuna, veg for lunch and occasionally the same thing for dinner(or udon noodles, and maybe chicken since I do eat that again now). Fairly boring from the outside, perhaps. No complaints here though. Special thanks to sesame oil, nutritional yeast, and hot sauce.

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