Turkey Squats in the Mountains

So this weekend the Missus and I loaded the hound into the car and headed off to the mountains of British Columbia to visit with some of my family for Thanksgiving, and also to get the hell out of the city for the weekend. While in town, we checked out the local gym, which I have to say is pretty impressive considering the size of the city. I’ve worked out in a lot of small-town gyms, with varying degrees of awesomeness and some types of “What the eff?” running through my mind, but this was a pleasant surprise. So I have to give a shout out to the World Gym in Tamarac mall in Cranbrook for running a top-notch weight room. Hell, they even play better music than my gym!

Back on track, I decided there was no better way to get prepped up for a gorging on turkey than doing some hard legs. So I set up shop in the squat rack and was preparing to do some back squats (which I’ve begun doing again for the first time in about 5 years). With the first warmup set using only the bar, there seemed to be something wrong with my right hip. I chalk it up to sitting and driving for 8 hours in the past 2 days, so I decided to change the gameplan slightly.

Instead of doing 3 sets of squats, I decided to do a graduated warmup, involving 7 sets of squats plus warmups, mobilizers and general bicep flexing gunnery.

Second set using the bar, still didn’t feel quite right, but felt slightly better. It was as if there was something gummy in the joint, and I noticed my weight shift wasn’t quite right from front to back and from left to right.

Third set using a 45 a side, felt a little better, still not 100%. I focused on shifting my weight and trying to get centered under the weight instead of just pushing through it. I considered it a technical lift, versus a performance lift.

Fourth set, 185, good but not great. The hip seemed to be getting better with each rep and the weight shift was moving a lot better. That being said, I decided heavy heavies wouldn’t be the right thing to do if the hip wasn’t feeling quite kosher, so I decided to do 2 more sets with 225 and call it a day for squats.

From there, everything seemed golden, but my desire to crank it up to 11 wasn’t there as I wanted to make sure I could walk into and out of dinner that evening, and also be able to handle the 8 hour drive home the next day. So from there I decided to crank out some upper body weights and call it a day.

This was a good reminder that even if you’re feeling bullet-proof, when the time comes to lift and it doesn’t feel “quite right,” there are still things to do to get a training response. I’ve had lots of workouts where I just “wasn’t feeling it” that day, and wound up not working as hard as I wanted to. So instead of wanting to sit this one out, I figured I would change the workout I had written up in my mind that morning over eggs and veggies, and alter the set and rep scheme to get some training benefit but to not wind up crippling myself trying to push when my body wanted to pull.

This is something I’ve used with my clients with some pretty good success. They come in feeling like a bag of rocks, and wind up feeling great after going through a workout that had some modifications and alterations to take advantage of what was going well, and avoiding what was going wrong. To put it another way, not matter what feels off, there’s a way to turn it on and get some training in.