Ceejbot

My legs are so sore. Time for the compression leggings!

But sumo-stance variant squatting today, with a pair of kettlebells instead of a barbell. The emphasis today was on getting my hips back while my torso stayed upright. I… um, what weight were they? I think they were 12kg. Might have been more. What happened to my brain? I spend 15 minutes sweating over them and I’ve forgotten already how much they weighed.

Other things I did today:

Two-handed swings with the same pair of kettlebells I was squatting with. Emphasis on loading up the hamstrings at the bottom position of the swing. Fire the glutes, lock out, then pull the bells back down as hard as possible to drive them back down behind myself.

A midback stability/strength isometric plank-position I’ve been doing 2 days a week for the last several weeks, aimed at making my pushups more like real pushups. Epic weakness in those muscles thanks to never having done a real pushup in my life before this fitness kick.

Walking lunges with a torso rotational stretch in the middle of each lunge. Not a leg strength exercise but a stretch. Still hard work.

Half an hour on the treadmill, some of that running. I traveled almost but not quite 2 miles in that time.

As you know, Bob, the squat is the king of exercises. If you’re going to do one thing at the gym when you go there, you should squat. Depending on the variant, your quads will be doing most of the work, but so much of the rest of your body is providing assistance and stabilization that it’s a whole body exercise. Hip and ankle flexibility, core stability, all-over leg strength! How can you not love squatting?

I did three squat variants today. Each of the squat variants was supersetted with something that kept me activating my mid-back and lats, to the point of exhaustion in those muscles.

5x high bar back squat @ 135#, 145, 155
15x Hammer seated row, some ungodly weight

5x front squat @ 95, 95, 105
15x cable face pulls

5x low bar back squat @ 95, 95, 105
15x straight arm pull-downs

Front squat limitation was the wrists, as usual. It was weird doing the low bar squats right after the front squats. I had to shift my whole mentality from a very upright position into that wide stance, hips back thing. I really could have loaded that one up a lot more.

I wonder how much my legs are going to hurt tomorrow.

Before every workout these days I do a half hour of stretching and foam rolling. It’s sometimes boring, sometimes painful. Today I also ran on a treadmill for five minutes, just to get everything warm. Then whee, squats and deadlifts!

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Man, it’s all about the squats for me these days. I’m completely into them. Specifically high bar squats, sometimes called Olympic squats, because they’re a supporting exercise for the Oly lifts… as well as being all around awesome for whole-body strength and cranking up your metabolism. More people should do squats. Want great legs? A great butt? Less heft around the middle? Squat heavy.

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I’ve got some kind of tendonitis thing cooking in my right elbow and wrist. I’m pretty sure it’s from the enormous amount of front squatting I’ve been doing. Ligaments and tendons strengthen more slowly than muscles. So to give my arms a break, I’m doing back squats at the same weight I was going front squats, and ramping up. I’ll return to front squats in a week or two, down at 120# where I left off.

Two interesting things about jumping into back squats at this weight. First, my squat depth is unrecognizably better than the last time I did this exercise. Second, all the stabilizing and supporting muscles are different from the front squat ones, and they’re the most challenged by this work volume. Translation: by the fifth set I was really struggling to stay upright while my legs were barely working.

Wednesday: 5x5 back squats @ 120# 5x5 bench press @ 90# 1x5 deadlift @ 190#

Today: 5x5 back squats @ 125# 5x5 overhead press @ 70# 5x5 barbell row @ 80#

Where’s the failure? The overhead press! I couldn’t manage the last rep of the third set. I ground out the other two sets on sheer adrenaline, I suspect. What does failure mean in a 5x5 program? I repeat the weight the next time I do presses. If I fail at a weight three times in a row, I’ll strip off some weight and work up to it again.