A Hump Day Full of Randomness
There have actually been a few days where there was frost on the ground in the mornings, and more than a few occasions where the furnace had to kick in during the day, which means it’s pretty much time to pack the bike away for the summer and start driving to work again. As a result of the reduced caloric expenditure, I have to make it up somewhere else, and have decided to hit up a few sets of sled pushes each workout to finish me off for the day. I gave it a try yesterday with 4 sets of 30 meters with 135 pounds on the sled. This is kind of what I looked like afterwards.
Afterwards, it was a good solid ten minutes before I felt like I wasn’t going to puke, and then I came to the slow realisation that I would have to run with a group that evening. Funny thing is, although my legs felt dead, my lungs were great despite having a wicked bad chest cold this weekend. As a result, what could have been a subpar run turned into a really strong one, and I managed to not feel like a bag of ass by the end of the day.
So Lindsay and I are thinking of an official honeymoon sometime next spring. We’ve narrowed the choices down to New York, Manhattan, and the Upper East Side apparently. Guess who got to say “Yes dear” a lot during that conversation?? Seriously though, we’re both pretty excited to go as neither of us have ever been before and we figure it will be the best time to go for both of us. Additionally, we’re hoping to also swing by Boston to check out the marathon, as I’ll probably have a client or two running in it, plus I have some friends I’d like to drop in on and say hi to. Who knows, I may even be able to parlay an in service talk at a couple of facilities and get some free workout time for the two of us to boot.
This weekend I’ll be presenting at the Calgary canfitpro conference, and my talk will be on “Muscle Imbalances and Performance: How to Find the Source of the Problem,” and I’m fully expecting to have everyone in the room begging for more. I’ve got 90 minutes of pure gold lined up, and will include some sweet free giveaways to everyone in the room too. Most of the people there will probably leave feeling 87.3% smarter, 901% more testosterone-y, and easily like it was the best seminar they’ve attended in their entire lives EVER. That being said, I may make the room monitors a little nervous, but I’m sure they can handle it 😉 If you’re going to be in the area, stop by on Saturday afternoon at the University of Calgary and we can fist bump it like champs.
I recently hit a 10 year PR on the bench press, getting up to 260. While this isn’t by any means impressive, it’s meaningful to me as I had about a decade of shoulder pain any time I tried to bench in the past, as a previous rotator cuff injury pretty much made me fail at life any time a bar was on my chest. I tried some different grip widths, different bar positions in my hands, and settled on using a grip slightly narrower than usual with a suicide grip (thumbs on the same side as the fingers), and the bar slightly lower in the hand towards the wrist. This feels the best, and leaves me with no shoulder pain afterwards.
While I’m sure Jim “Smitty Diesel” Smith would call me an idiot for doing this, I would rather use a slightly risky grip and train pain-free than use a safe grip and develop shoulder pain from the movement.
My hope is to get my bench over 300 by Christmas and then see where it can go from there. I still have hopes of getting my deadlift over 500, and maybe even dropping into a 300 front squat, but training for everything leaves you getting no where. I prefer to focus on one goal at a time, hit it, then move on to the next, versus try to get 6 goals at once and get mad because they aren’t moving forward very well.
On that note, Eric Cressey put together a nice little webinar on why you aren’t getting stronger/leaner/bigger/healthier/more Kanye-er, and is sharing it with everyone HERE. Seriously, click the video and it will change how you look at most programs and why they don’t work for you.
On a final note, Lindsay has a midterm in financial math tonight, so everyone take a second and wish her good luck in the comments section. 🙂