Progress Report: The Problem with my Programming

I admit it. My style of training is brutal. Doing 150% of your one rep max week after week tends to burn out the central nervous system quickly.  This leads to achiness and soreness in the joints and muscles.

I was thinking that if I took 96+ hours of rest between workouts, I would heal my joints and muscles nicely and have them ready to attack the weights. But instead as soon as I tried to push up a dead chest press for my latest workout, my front deltoids were in severe throbbing inflammation. Well, I thought to myself, this is going to be a slow and long painful workout.

Take a look at my numbers.

Gym Saturday 9/6/14 11 a.m.
Pause back squat wearing inzer strongman knee sleeves 335-2
Shoulder press seated 325-1
Freemotion bicep curl cable machine 150-2
Freemotion decline press cable machine 180-0
One legged stiff legged deadlift
Left 255-1
Right 255-1
One hand rack pull
Left 335-0
Right 335-0
Precor incline press machine 220-0, 220-1, 240-0
Romanian deadlift with straps 355-1


Home 9/10/14 Wednesday 12:38 PM
Dead chest press 255-1, 265-0
Dead chest press legs crossed in the air 255-1
Conventional deadlift with straps no belt 535-0
Stiff legged deadlift with straps no belt
525--0
Pause back squat wearing inzer strongman knee sleeves no belt 345-0

On 9/6, I did ten exercises and got through it all right. On 9/10, I could barely get through five exercises because of joint and muscle inflammation and overall body aching.

My point is yeah I admit that my workouts are brutal and they do lead to early burnout of the central nervous system, but if I take a break and rest up for a week or two I'll lose the hard earned strength gains I have made. So to avoid that I'm still going to do the main lifts and their respective variations, but I'm going to stop for a week or two the hypertrophy training I do for smaller muscles.

For triceps as an example I'll get on a cable machine and work up to 200% of my one rep max and try and lift the weight so there is at least an inch gap between the plates in the stack. Then I'll go down about forty pounds and try and hit that for a couple reps until failure. Then I'll go down again another thirty pounds and bang on that until failure, and I'll keep doing that until I'm lifting ten or twenty pounds for thirty or so reps or whatever number it takes to make my triceps feel like they're on fire.  I'll do four or five cycles of that and my triceps are rock hard for the next couple days from all the inflammation and the blood engorged within them.

The problem with this is my body can only take about a month and half of that kind of training until I get inflamed and sore, so I'm going to just concentrate on the main lifts in the low rep range and not worry so much about trying to achieve that burn that is brought on by ultra high reps.

Here's me in a dreadfully burnt out state attempting some lifts.

This is a 255 lb dead chest press attempt for a rating of "1".

This is a conventional deadlift attempt with straps of 535 lbs for a "0" rating.

As a side note, I don't know if you like kefir but I find it fills the stomach quite nicely and provides some decent anabolic stimulus to the muscles. Just make sure to get the unflavored kind to avoid any insulin spikes caused by the sugary flavored kefir varieties.

Also I had some complications with my Romanian deadlift. It seems that my spine doesn't like first deadlifting the weight up and then letting go of my breath and lowering the weight down for the Romanian deadlift phase of the lift.

Look at this guy to see what I'm talking about:

You see, as can be gleaned from the video, the guy has to let go of his breath at the top of the lift to set up for the Romanian deadlift. The problem with that is when you let go of your breath, the heavy weight you're holding compresses the spine because you lose tightness in the low back when not maintaining the air held in your lungs.   So when you go down to begin the Romanian deadlift, the spine loses its alignment which when pulling up on a heavy weight for a one rep max can lead to spinal injuries.

To remedy this, I'm going to eliminate the deadlift part of the lift and either walk the bar out from a squat or power rack with a held breath or I'll pull the bar from a dead position using a power rack or 45 lb plates set at the proper height.