Tuesday: Squat, Erg & Ice (7th OLAP)

Today was light squat day, and I was thankful that it was light because I'm starting to hurt.  The hamstrings are still complaining, and the right knee has been painful since heavy day.  I really don't want to back down before the Masters Nationals, so I rolled out the hamstrings on lacrosse balls and coated both legs from butt to patella with Blue Heat.

Blue Heat and balls powerlifting porn.  Actually if you imagine this several times smaller
and with the balls also blue, that's pretty much what my genitals
 looked like after today's ice bath,

After getting all my parts mostly working, I did squats:
5 x 75 (75 was on the floor after the 5:30 class, and if it's going to be that easy to be lazy, well...These were also the most painful squats of the day, but now everything was really working.)
5 x 135
8 x 170
6 x 210
5 x 250
4 x 265
3 x 285
3 x 305
3 x 305

I'm sure I need to remember metabolic conditioning work, so I looked into the Max Effort Black Box and found:

40 Squats at bodyweight
1,000 meter row

With 185 pounds on the bar, I finished in 7:58.  I was disappointed that I had to break up the squats since I've done 33 at 185 before.  I will remember to try this again on fresh legs; it was fun, and I can probably break 6:00.  I also think it would be fun to do this weekly over a month and wave the squat intensity up to 75 or 80 percent while trying to hold the row constant.  185 is less than 50% of 1rm for me, and while it's no joke for forty repetitions, I'd like to see how far I can push this.

If you're counting, today's squat volume was16,065 pounds, just over 8 tons.  All of this was under 80% of my competition 1rm, but it felt heavy to me, so I thought I should be proactive and take an ice bath.

Ice

I tried this last summer after doing a squat cluster, and it seemed to work.  The ice bath on a March morning seems worse than on a July afternoon, but I did ten minutes with twenty pounds of ice.  Bad though it might be, it's better than forgetting to wash your hands before going to the bathroom after applying Blue Heat.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll find that it was effective.

All I could tell this morning was that it gave me cold feelings.

Fourth OLAP & Accusatory Bands

Yesterday, Tuesday, was light squat day.  I got started at 6:40 am and did:

5 x 45 (high)
5 x 45
5 x 135
8 x 170
6 x 210
6 x 250
5 x 265
5 x 285
5 x 285

I decided to again follow my own rule of squatting the bar x 5 until I can get five good reps, and it took two tries.  I did all the squats in Chucks.  Lately I've used O-lifting shoes for squatting, and I wanted to feel the Converse again on a light day.  I'm not sure what I'll use at the meet.  While I like the lifting shoes, I feel they force a wider stance to recruit the hamstrings.  In the Chucks I had no problem feeling everything engage like I want; the problem is that today I still feel the hamstring insertion in a painful way.

I finished about 7:15, and in some sense I should have done metabolic conditioning afterwards, but I knew it was a day to exert the minimal effort and go home since I was feeling neither good nor energetic.   What I like about my event based training is that I always know what my competition goals are.  Essentially I'm trying to PR both the squat and the deadlift in May while holding the bench as close to my former maximum as possible.  I could tell that doing conditioning was going to fry me, and it's not what's driving my desired adaptation, so I had no qualms about calling it a day.


Late this afternoon I was at the gym alone, and as I came out of the rest room I saw this:

To a powerlifter, a cage with bands is a beautiful thing, erglike in fact to me, and on seeing the blue band I thought I really should do some heavy reverse banded squats on heavy day.

But I kept looking and I saw the red band and the purple band.

And the red band spoke.

"Aren't you supposed to be doing banded pull aparts?"

And the purple band spoke.

"Aren't you supposed to be working the rotator cuff?"

And I knew they spoke truly.  So I did minimal rehab work; half a pie is better than none.  I've had no dietary sins for five days now.


I left work early today for a long lunch so that I could train jiu-jitsu at Dark Horse BJJ.  It was cold when I left work, but after training and some very light rolling I had to drive back to work with the windows down.  I remember some winter days driving back from Easton BJJ Boulder with the windows down and snow on the ground, and that's only one simple thing I've dearly missed about Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

Look for my new BJJ blog coming soon.