January 13th - Heavy bench and light squat

 13.01.2025

Nice day. Nutrition decent, but hard to pinpoint. Sleep good. Had one 40/480 (1 to 120) conventional brew... 480 grams of water is only three cups. Peculiar. It's bad when you still want coffee but it's taking its sweet time brewing in your stomach all liquidy. You have some more and you wanna vomit...

Today we're benching. Also I'd like to not forget about my squat - it needs to go up, at least a bit. Maybe I could train squat in lower volume for now - but with higher weights. It's great for putting yourself in a good shape... But not good enough for progress. Progress needs heavy volume - i.e. in 90% of the cases it's about two or three times more working volume than you 'naturally' feel you need. And it takes a lot of sacrifice and dedication, but the body does respond clearly and quickly with immediate strength improvement... Push yourself in multiple sets. Pushing yourself in one heavy set is great, it is what you should learn first, it's lovely for noobie or hardgainer gains, but it's not good enough for someone strong who has the ability to manage and optimize their recovery to be perfect... And recovery isn't just when you 'recover' your energy, it's when you intentionally ACCUMULATE your energy, make yourself feel perfect with what you know your body loves. Then you can spend this accumulated energy. I'm pretty bad at it - lacking discipline. But it does happen.

Bench. To go for triples or start a new microcycle already? Why not both? Well, that wouldn't be quite smart.

Workout

Warmup - variations of super-controlled short-range L-flys with a PVC pipe, rubber pulldowns and partial pullups

Bench

20 for 20

40 for 15

60 for 15

90 for 15 creaky pecs

110 for 10 - better, easy

120 for 5

130 for 3 lovely, rather easy, pecs better

140 for 3 lovely

140 for 3

143 for 3 still fairly easy

145 for 3 - good

Squat

60 for 5

90 for 5

130 for 5

140 for 5

Glad I've rediscovered powerlifting cues and now I have a particular mix of a powerlifting and a weightlifting squat which still feels more like a weightlifting squat, especially with my high bar. I think soon it'll be two or maybe even three? years since the last time I did a low back back squat.

Man, 2015 was sort of a 'modern era'. 2014 felt like the past and now it's been ten years since 2015. How curious. What a decade! Glad I could do squat today. Enjoying re-writing old parts...