My training History: I trained less than one year before competing in my first powerlifting meet as a teenager back in 1983. Before leaving the sport partially due to injuries in 2005 I achieved my elitefts status in the 198,220,242,275 & 308 weight class. Throughout these years I did have a 3 year run in the bodybuilding world. I have degenerative joint disease, have had two shoulder surgeries (right shoulder now needs replaced), one full hip replacement, knee surgery, and herniation's in all three regions of my spine, Bone spurs (all joints). I can't even begin to list the number of muscle tears I have had, surgical and non surgical. I am "The Mashed Up Meathead" and this is my story.
You can find my training log archives HERE and my most current training log posts HERE.
My best lifts are behind be but my best training is yet to come.
* Unless otherwise noted the tempo of the work sets is about 1/2 of what most would consider normal. In most cases, if I did the set with normal temp what I fail at with 8-10 reps in training I could do for 20 reps with a normal tempo. This is to keep the joint stress down while increase the stress on the muscle. I have found this to work best for me provided the conditions listed in my training history above.
Monday: biceps.
This is going to be another one of those messed up weeks when it comes to what's being trained on what day, so I'm just going to take it day-by-day and see how it goes. As we move closer to the holidays things start to get a little thrown out of whack.
I had a couple of meetings this morning that put me behind on a few things, and then I was planning on training shoulders, then one of my buddies came out to train. He was going to be training pretty much every day this week. We changed what we wanted to train because he was helping his daughter with some squats and some other things he wanted to help her with, which either meant I was going to train nothing, or have to come up with something else to do.
Tomorrow we decided we're going to do triceps and shoulders, and then some day this week we got to do legs, and then we got to get chest in as well. So, it kind of left me, by a matter of elimination, training biceps, and I really can't think of another time in my life that I've trained biceps alone without any other body part, so I didn't.
Face curls using the Tsunami bar.
I really like this bar for this exercise, and I know most people aren't going to have this bar, and you're certainly not going to pick this bar up just to do phase curls. It would be stupid. It's a great bar for a lot of different things. What I like about it with phase curls is it bends, and while I'm doing the movement- I have the cable set up at about eye level- I pre-bend the bar, and I keep it bent throughout the whole motion, which puts extra tension on the biceps.
Then at the end of the set I'm able to let the bar unwind, or unbend, which gives me a great stretch at the end of the set. I did two warm up sets to adjust and figure out what weight I was going to use, and then did seven sets of twelve to fifteen reps with tight form. Every set was to failure.
One arm lying face curls using the Tsunami grip handles
I don't think I've ever done this exercise before. I figured what the hell, it's biceps. Come up with something you've never done before. I don't know if I really liked it that much. I don't like single arm shit to begin with because it just takes twice as much time, but I did each set as a double set going back and forth, and did six rounds of that. All the repetitions were to failure. The first round would have been somewhere between ten and twelve reps, and the second round I was dying out at about four, maybe five reps.
Preacher curls using a glute/ham bench, one arm at a time.
Now, this I do typically always do one arm at at time because using a straight bar, or even an easy curl bar on these just kills my forearms and elbows both, actually. With this I didn't need any warm up sets. I know what weight to use. Four sets of twelve to fifteen, all sets to failure.
Seated barbell curls.
This is done exactly as it sounds. Just sit on the bench. Put the bar on my lap, curl it up, set it back down on to my legs. On this I found over time I used to go heavier on it, and I've gone lighter on it. I find that if I do it closer to the end of my bicep training, and just stick with the bar, and control the tempo to fail between eight to ten, I get more out of the movement and a better pump, if we want to put it that way, out of it doing it this way than I do putting any kind of weight on it.
Neutral grip hang, just using the Tsunami grips again.
I hooked them around the chin bar, and grabbed ... I can't hang on a chin bar with my palms facing towards me without it tweaking the shit out of my elbows. It's going to take me a little bit of time to get that flexibility back. I did have that flexibility back about six to nine months ago, and kind of lost it because I quit doing the stretching on it. The way that I get it back is by using some type of handle grip that I can hang from which isn't completely neutral.
I can turn a little bit, and I turn to right where it's a max stretch, to where it begins to feel uncomfortable, then I turn it back in just a little bit so it's not uncomfortable. Then I hang on that stretch for a thirty count, and I did that for three sets.