Thursday, July 18, 2013

Squats...more please!

Good squat session on Wednesday night though interestingly the vibe was a little quiet. I suspect the gym transitioning to 24/7 operation is allowing people a little more flexibility to vary their training times. Regardless Dan was in holding a group coaching session and doing a great job as always with some relative newcomers to PTC (though Dan we got to talk about that ghetto trash music!!!).

My wingman Darwin was under the squat bar working his squat pretty hard for reps though speaking to him later he may have overdone it a fraction. No worries he is young strong and has plenty of recovery ability. Already a world record holder in the deadlift he is pushing hard to have his bench and squat catch up (look out when he does)!

Hit a nice rep record on my final set of squats which pushed my working max up nicely for the next months block of training. However I fucked up the number of reps and pulled the trigger 2-3 shy of failure when I should have pushed this set harder. I will make sure I pay for that on deadlifts tonight!

There are still technical form issues I am working on but I feel much stronger out of the hole than at Nationals where I was trying just to keep up with the rest of the team and hit my planned numbers. Whereas now I feel like I am really building a solid raw base.

I can understand now why Chad Wesley Smith prefers the inverted Jugg (10 sets of 5 with minimal rest) than 5x10.  You can really feel the form degrade heavily on the back end of the higher rep sets and while that's normal it probably makes sense for us newbies to get quality reps and not reinforce shit form.

The key for me in the squat is the warm-up. Checking back on my training logs I can see that where a squat session felt ordinary or harder etc then generally this corresponded to me rushing in late from work or rushing to get out i.e not enough warm ups.  So now I make sure squat night is un-rushed with lots of hip activation/stretching and plenty of goblet squats to get everything warm.

Funny I don't have any competition for another 9-10 months but I can already feel the build up to States!

Stay Strong
Thomo







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