GIFt us your lifts! (or other achievements!)

nossmf wrote: »

Whew! Finally finished! I've known about this thread for years, but never opened it until now. Started reading, got 10 pages in and debated jumping ahead to the end, decided instead to read EVERY. SINGLE. POST. Took me two days to do so, since I read it at work and could only get a few pages at a time during breaks between meetings. Very glad I did, as I was able to live the drama of watching progression, the making and breaking of records, the preparation for the strongwoman competition, the very positive vibes from (almost) every poster (compared to the occasionally nasty vibes from some other threads in MFP). The only real irritating part was I couldn't post my two cents at random intervals into conversations which took place months/years ago. Well, now I get to make a few comments, which may seem random but are, in fact, directly associated with one or more moments throughout this thread...

*****

I am solidly in the "up at crack of dawn to lift" camp. As in 4:30 alarm so I can be at the gym when it opens at 5. Part of this is I simply am a morning person (complete opposite of my wife). Part of this is so I can get my workout in before work, as I know after work won't be time between commute, cooking dinner for my family (I'm the chef), helping my wife and daughter with their homework (wife close to completing her college degree), and a little alone time with my wife before bed (watching TV, keep this thread PG-13, lol). Part of the reason is the smaller crowd at that time of day. But I've also kept a journal of every workout I've done for the last 14 years, and have actual proof that I simply perform better in the morning. If I hit the weight room in the afternoon, my weights drop about 5-10% from my morning numbers; if I wait until the evening, it's more like 25%.

*****

Back when I was a powerlifter (I'll talk about me later), I remember ramming straight into a brick wall when trying to squat 315. I could get 310, but something about that third plate per side was just a mental block I could not overcome. So I tried something different...instead of pushing for a 1RM every leg day, I spent three months dropping the weight to 225, and just repping the blazes out of it. I'm talking sets of 10, 15, 20, 25. At the end of that three months I did a set of 100, where I could rest as long as I wanted between reps but couldn't re-rack the weight until I had finished all 100. (Longest 20 minutes of my life, believe you me.) Took a week off, and tried my 1RM again. Turns out, my max had in fact increased, and I was able to hit 315...for 10 reps. Turns out my max had leaped up to 365! Do I recommend doing a set of 100? Only if you're a glutton for punishment like I was, but the point is I gained over 50 pounds on my max without ever actually lifting close to my max, but instead through use of sub-maximal loads.

*****

Speaking of mind-over-lifting, knew a guy at the gym who was equally convinced he could never bench 225. I knew how strong he was, figured he didn't need to wait the 3 months like I did on squat, so I offered to spot for him one workout, but only if he allowed me to do the weight loading during his warmup, he had to just remain lying down the entire time. He looked at me funny, but agreed. He looked at me even funnier when I started loading his bar, not with 25's or 45's, but a whole bunch of 5's and 10's, and not in any particular order, but a random smattering. He completely lost count trying to add it all up, and just accepted my promise he was lifting the right amount. I, of course, had kept very close watch over how much I loaded, and after one set where he banged out 3 very clean reps, I had him stop and do the math with me. This man, convinced he could never do a single rep at 225, had just done 3 reps at 245! He never asked me to spot him again, but I saw him a few years later benching 315, and I just smiled and turned away.

*****

When I first began lifting, not only was I overweight, but I was also clearly the weakest person in the weight room. Not just weakest man, weakest PERSON, as the ladies were all outlifting me, even ones half my size. I was determined not to quit, but I simply knew that I didn't belong lifting. So, I fooled myself. Sounds bloody corny, but I wore sunglasses inside the weight room, cut the sleeves off my shirts into makeshift tanks, loaded my music player with angry heavy-metal music (I'm normally a country guy) and literally looked at this person in the mirror and said (not out loud), "Meet Joe Cool, he loves to lift, he belongs here." Did this for about 3 months, until some combination of losing weight, increasing weights lifted, and simple familiarity with the place allowed me to remove the shades and acknowledge that I was the one standing there, right where I belonged. (Kept the music and the shirts.)

*****

In 14+ years of lifting, I have been injured three times seriously enough to be forced to take time away from lifting. Two of those times were during deadlifts, and both occurred during the initial pull off the floor. I love deadlifts, but at age 46 I have to admit I'm more prone to injury, and the same injury today will take longer to recover than a decade ago. In talking about the situation with a personal trainer buddy, he recommended trying rack pulls, since I could do 90% of the same ROM and avoid entirely the initial floor-break which has been the source of my problems. I have since fallen in love with them, and without that initial break I'm definitely able to load up the weight considerably heavier; the other day I did 5x5 with a weight 40 pounds heavier than the weight which injured my lower back for a single rep the last time I tried deadlifts.

*****

I'm out of time now (time to enter "rush hour" for my hour+ commute home), and this has already grown long enough. But I wanted to say hi, kudos all around, loved the read, I've now added my little contribution to previous conversations, and tomorrow I will do my obligatory "about me" post. All words, no GIFs I'm afraid. My gym has a no-recording rule to respect privacy of others who may not want to be recorded.

nossmf wrote: »

Intro time! My name is Mike, and I'm addicted to lifting. (Hi, Mike.) As a kid I was a scrawny, big glasses nerd capable of repelling all females from a dozen yards away. But I could run, and earned my letterman's jacket in both track (100m, 200m, 400m) and cross country (5km).

Fast forward 15 years, I just got kicked out of the military as part of their force-wide down-sizing. Had a wife, 4 kids, a mortgage, and no income, along with being overweight from having worked a desk job for years with little time to exercise. Between my arthritic knees (thanks, mom), extra 60 pounds around the middle (thanks, tater tots and soda), and living at high altitude where the air is thin, a return to running seemed a bad idea. A buddy tried to cheer me up from a growing depression, not through drinks on the town, but by taking me to his gym as a guest to try to find something I could do to get active and take my mind off my problems. Tried a variety of cardio, swimming, basketball, nothing clicked until we went to the weight room. I was highly skeptical, but from the very first set picking up a dumbbell and doing curls, there was no turning back. As I pointed out in my previous post, I didn't feel comfortable surrounded by all these in-shape peeps, and I couldn't afford to buy a home gym setup, but there was no way I was giving up this newfound love. It's just immensely cathartic to look at a cold block of iron and proclaim to the universe, "you will move because I will it to be so." Throwing around iron released so much pent-up angst and anger, my family immediately noted the difference in my attitude upon my return home, so with my wife's agreement I got a membership to the gym so I could keep lifting, even though we were worried about food and mortgage payments. But I got hired to a much better paying job less than a month later, and so life continued.

The nerd in me wanted to learn as much as possible, so I pored through every magazine article and website I could locate. Unfortunately, much of the information I gleaned was later proven wrong, or at least not applicable to an average lifter like me. But over time I learned what tidbits to keep and what to ignore. I also have tried a variety of lifting regimens:

Full body 3x per week
One body part per day, 6 days per week
Wendler 5-3-1
Strong Lifts 5x5
Madcow
PPL (Push, Pull, Legs)
At least a dozen routines straight from a magazine's pages

Most of the routines I tried lasted for 6 months or less, as I kept bouncing from one routine to another, trying to find the one which would help me lift ever heavier. My guess is there was a small part of my brain remembering being a wimp as a kid, so once I started actually having muscles and moving appreciable weight, it became an addiction to somehow snuff out that memory of the old me or something. Point is, while I built up to a decent level of strength (my Big 3 of bench, squat, and deadlift at one point combined to 1185 at a bodyweight of 193), it also left me a tad reckless and vulnerable to injury. Such as when I tried to bench a weight beyond my ability; I finished the lift (285 PR), but tore ligaments in both shoulders, narrowly avoiding surgery and having to swap lifting for rehab for the next 6 months. Or the pair of deadlifts which tweaked my lower back, one of them keeping me bed-ridden for two weeks and heavily modifying my lifting for the next six months to not reaggravate it.

Eventually I migrated into my current routine I built for myself, based off the PHUL (Power Hypertrophy Upper Lower) platform. It goes like this:

Monday - Upper Power
Bench Press 5x5
Cable Row 5x5
DB Press <superset> DB Row 5x5
Seated BB OHP 3x5

Tuesday - Lower Power
Rack Pull 5x5
BB Hip Thrust 5x5
One-Leg Press 5x5
Cable Crunch 4x10

Wednesday - Cardio (one hour elliptical, it's easy on my knees)

Thursday - Upper Hypertrophy
Incline Bench Press 3x10
Machine Fly 3x12
BB Row 3x10
Pulldown 3x10 (one set each of hands facing away, middle, and towards me)
Face Pull 3x10
Machine Lateral Raise 3x12
Machine Curl <superset> Machine Pushdown 3x10
Perloff Press 3x15sec

Friday - Lower Hypertrophy
Squats 4x15
BB Step-Ups 3x12
BB RDL 3x10
Leg Extension 3x12
Seated Leg Curl 3x12
Seated Calves Extend 3x12
Farmer's Carry 3x40s

Saturday & Sunday - Off

This lets me keep lifting relatively heavy (but without pursuing the dangerous 1RM) while hitting all the peripheral muscles each week and keeping each session to an hour or less. Any given day, I can reduce the weight used on any lift by up to 10%, no questions asked: some days, you just don't have it going for you. (If this happens in consecutive weeks, I drop weight permanently and have to "earn" it back.) Other days you feel like a beast, but rather than lift heavier, I do more reps. When I can do a lift for required reps plus two for every set for two consecutive workouts, then and only then do I increase the weight on the third workout.

Feel free to give feedback about my workout plan. The nerd in me is always looking to learn more. (I may no longer look like the scrawny geek I used to be, but I can talk your ear off about Star Wars/Trek, LOTR and Marvel with the best of them, lol.)

nossmf wrote: »

Upper body power day this morning (a crowd favorite), and making good progress lately. As I said previous, I don't go up in weight until I can get all sets for target reps +2, which on power day means all five sets for seven reps. My bench today I got 6 reps first four sets, 7 reps on the final with gas in the tank, so I figure another week (or two) and I'll be able to increase my bench weight for the first time in a few months.

Meanwhile, I did smash the 5x7 threshold on BB OHP, so next week I'll tack on 10# and see where I'm at. If I can get at least 4 reps per set I'll keep it; if even one set gets only 3, I'll back off 5# (which will still be heavier than what I'm using now).

I tried the suggested "pistol grip" but it didn't last long, as my heavy working sets just couldn't keep a grip with only three fingers. I'll try again on Thursday's hypertrophy day, when the weights are moderately heavy. Wasn't an issue today with my elbow/grip anyway...I've determined my grip is just fine when my wrists are pointing up or in, it's only when facing down that there's an issue.

Which actually reminds me of another question I have: for anybody who does face pulls, how do you have your wrists aligned? Where is the knot at the end of the rope...by your thumb or by your pinkie? It feels much more comfortable with the knot by my thumb, but I think I get better rear delt activation with the knot by my pinkie.

Saw a video over the weekend which had me dying laughing, tears and everything. There's a professional strongman from some eastern European country who likes to spoof unsuspecting lifters. In this video, he dressed up in janitor coveralls to hide his figure, and wandered around with a mop pretending to clean, occasionally jumping into somebody's routine to show them off without seeming to do so. For example, two guys were doing bent-over BB rows with 315, seriously strong dudes. This guy walks up, very humbly excusing himself to clean, and picks up the bar...with one hand...while he "mops" under the bar, all while talking with a normal voice, no grunts or straining apparent. He does a few reps rowing this weight...mind you, 315 with a SINGLE HAND...before moving on, all casual as can be, leaving these two guys to pick up their jaws from the floor. Wish I could link it here...it was embedded in an email...but even days later I chuckle just thinking about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP8JDg-HloQ

springlering62 wrote: »

My latest achievement is a broken toe.

But I did it on a flying trapeze. How many people get to say that, and not be making it up?!

I also got 5+ spins of my move ring yesterday, piddly *kitten* toe break not withstanding.

It’s not a lift, and my lifts aren’t worth GIF’ing anyway, no matter how happy or not I am with them, but it’s mine own achievement. 👍🏻