I’ve written about a similar issue to today’s topic in prior chapters of Old Man Conjugate, but felt that the incidents of the last two weeks were a good illustration for an update. In today’s installment of Old Man Conjugate: Improvise, Adapt and Overcome; What to do when stuff isn’t going according to the plan I am going to give some advice on dealing with injury and adversity in meet prep situations. And it’s not just for the Old Men. It’s for all of you!
The Old Men will recognize the title as a line from Heartbreak Ridge from Gunnery Sgt. Highway.
A primary principle of Old Man Conjugate is to find something effective that you can do today and this will really illustrate it. I believe that most of the readers of the Old Man Conjugate series are people like me, a little older, a little beat up yet we still want to train.
Today we are going to be using one of my lifters, Brian as an example. Brian is a former RAW Powerlifter making the jump to Multi Ply, and he is 5 weeks out from his first meet. He’s not an Old Man, but not a young one either. His training has been going really well this cycle and his squat is going through the roof.
But.
Last week he suffered and injury to his lower abdomen/upper groinal region (is that a word-groinal-it is today). Anyway, this injury prevented him from benching last week without extreme pain. After consultation with his doctor, he is cleared to do whatever does not cause pain, so we are still training.
Going back to last week and the bench session, Brian was unable to bench at all without severe pain as I said, but he was 6 weeks out then and was dedicated to doing the meet. So, in the spirit of Old Man Conjugate, we found something that he could do. The Edema Press. Click the link to see what it is.
I came up with the Edema Press a few years ago after being inspired by one of the Greatest Bench Pressers ever, Vincent Dizenzo. Vincent was unable to bench with his legs down many years ago and put on a show benching around 700 pounds with his feet on folding steel chairs. He found something he could do that day. I added this exercise into a program for two of my lifters that had disc injuries as part of their rehab.
We found that it did wonders for their bench when they were able to out their feet back down on the floor.
Circling back, when Brian couldn’t bench we applied Old Man Conjugate: Improvise, Adapt and Overcome and we found that he could Edema Press with no pain.
Yesterday was bench day again and he was supposed to do a 1 rep max on the Reverse Band Bench press, but he could not put his feet on the floor without crippling pain.
However, he was able to smash a PR bigger than his current equipped bench on the Edema Press.
After he did it, Brian seemed concerned about the meet.
I told him that we would Improvise, Adapt and Overcome on meet day. We will continue to train for the meet as long as it does not cause further injury and when meet day comes, the worst case scenario is that he takes a token empty bar bench to get a total.
Doing this will give him a real Squat and Deadlift PR to work forward from and we can use his Edema Bench as a number to base the number for his regular Bench Press in the next training cycle. I figure if he can bench that amount with his feet up, he can do it with his feet down once he is healthy.
Brian seemed relieved with this solution. As coaches, we should not be pointing out flaws, we should be looking for solutions.
Here are your takeaway points for Old Man Conjugate: Improvise, Adapt and Overcome:
- Never quit
- Just because it is written in the program, that doesn’t mean it is the right thing to do today
- You have to be flexible and go with the flow
- You have to find things that you can do
- You have to Improvise, Adapt and Overcome
- Don’t force something if you are really injured, work around it.
- If you do force it, the injury is going to get much worse
- If you work around it, you’ll win the battle. And to win the war you have to win battles
I hope this installment of Old Man Conjugate sheds some light on what to do when stuff isn’t going according to the plan.
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Vincere vel mori
C.J. Murphy
February 3, 2022
