TRAINING UPDATE

 

If you've been following my blog, you've noticed I haven't been posting my training sessions over the past several weeks. The reason for this is not because I haven't been training. I actually have. The reason for it is, I'm kind of working the kinks out of the training program or template that I'm going to be using for who knows how long, I expect it to be for a couple years.

 

A quick back story on this is, after the Arnold Classic, when I sat down with John Meadows to go over what he wanted to do with his training moving forward, and mapping out the plan, it was radically different from the plan that he's been using for the past four or five years. When I say radically different, I truly mean radically different. Basically everything turned upside down. Dumping all the rocks from the jar out on the table and putting them in a whole different jar. My training has been a *modified version of his for the past few years.

 

*modified - my needs are not the same and I have more limitations than he does. In some cases I can do more than he can (lower back work for example) but it the case of pressing and vertical pulling movements I have far more limitations. I also do not have the ability and recovery to train as many days per week as he can.

 

 

When I was looking at what he had mapped out, what I've tried to do in the past is stick to pretty close to the same training template, but then modify it to what my training needs were, which was and is more joint-friendly, slower tempos, elimination of movements that create more joint stress than I can tolerate, and the inclusion of certain movements and training principles that do help with joint health, where what he presented in regards to frequency was off the charts compared to anything that I've done in probably ten years.

 

Once we kind of got it figured out for him and balanced for him to be able to start experimenting with, the more I looked at it and the more opportunity I saw for me to be able to make it work, but I would have to implement some radical changes on my end to be able to make it work. Through this process I saw that there's a way that I can concurrently build out on what he had structured.

 

Essentially what I'm doing is:

* what he has structured is going to make up the bulk of all the accessory work, but modified for my joint limitations.

* I am including more of a conjugate system into the program because of the way that the frequency is set up. It's set up in such a way that I can put in some dynamic effort work and max effort work, which I haven't done for a long time

* Implement that in a way that I think is more joint friendly than I used it fifteen years ago, and see what kind of impact that's going to have on my strength knowing that the way that I'm going to do it with all the hypertrophy work and repetition work that's going to be in there.

* Keep and increase those items I have found to enhance joint health and have kept the degeneration at bay.

* Take this last point an extra step future.

* Add steady state cardio to aid in recovery.

* Cycle, not the intensity, the training effort factors on a scale of High, Med and Low in a way similar to how I used to cycle Intensity.

* To complicate matters more I am in the process of cutting bodyfat.

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It's going to take away from the maximal strength results that could be achieved from it, but it's going to have more of a balanced approach between being a strength and muscle building program instead of being a 100% whole muscle building program, which is essentially what I've been doing over the past six, seven years. It's also not going to be a full strength program, which is essentially what I did for my entire life, so it's kind of a balance between the two.

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What I've been doing over the past few weeks is playing around with the training days as far as how the recovery is going to be, which, the way that I do this, when trying to find and build a program is, I will remove any intro workout recovery, I will remove any steady-state cardio that I would be using for recovery. I remove the hot tub. Anything that I do for recovery with the exception of MAT and physical therapy work that I religiously do, I pull out when I'm testing a program like this, because I want to be in a state of the least ability to recover, because I can always add those things to help aid in the recovery.

 

That's what I've been doing for the past three - four weeks. To post that would be extremely confusing, it would look like a mess because there's so much experimentation and moving things around and stopping training sessions halfway through. It's a lot of screwing things around and moving things around to be able to get the optimal recovery, which I do now think that I've kind of locked in the days. I've locked in how the squat's going to wave, how the bench is going to wave. I have not locked in how I'm going to put in any lower back work at this point.

 

That's the only variable I still have to get locked in there, and then the last variable, once I have all those things done, is I want to send it to Dani Overcash to look at just in regards to the stress on the joints and the joint health, muscle balance, and to see if she sees anything that sticks out like a sore thumb. After she gives the template an overview, then I'll run it full throttle and see how it works, but throughout the experimenting over the past few weeks the strength and the lifts that I'm using as my indicators, which are the floor press and the yoke bar box squat has significantly gone up, probably more so just because it's been so long since I've done anything heavy, so it's more of a coordination thing, getting used to lifting the heavier weights again. There's some neuro-muscular coordination going on and probably even some muscular coordination on how to handle the heavier weights going on, which is responsible for the strength increase that I've seen thus far, which is good, because I want to get those out of the way too. If there's strength increase over the three months that I'm doing the program, it's not going to be responsible for things that are going to naturally occur anyhow. I want it to be responsible for the actual training of the program.

 

That's where my training is right now. It's kind of a mess,  With this template there is also a wave in the intensity factors, which I'll explain more later, which is going to extend over a ten week period of time, and it's not a linear fashion. This is just an update basically saying that the training's still being done and there has been a ton of time, thought, and discussion with many going into how this will all come together.

 

Again, this is not just a simple training change - it's a major overhaul.

 

DIET AND BODY FAT

 

Body fat  - I do have down to 14%, which is where my goal was before I would have to start actually structuring things and dieting to a full degree. It took a long time, maybe six, eight months to be able to go from wherever I was at 21, 22% down to the 14%.

 

I did that exactly the same way that I've always said for years. It doesn't take rocket science, it doesn't take a nutritionist, it doesn't take some nutritional guru to be able to fucking get down to 14% if you're in the 20%. All you need to do is to make healthier food choices half the time, drink more water, and do your training sessions. It's not that fucking complicated.

 

If you do those things consistently, you're going to go from 20% down to somewhere in the mid-teens without having to worry about meal plans and all this other bullshit that everybody worries about way too soon. Once you get into the teens, you start to go a little bit lower, then things are going to become a little bit more complicated, but I didn't want to have to deal or play any of those cards to be able to get down to 14%, because you should be able to do that basically just on accident, making better choices.

It may still take a couple weeks to dial all of this in but I will post a couple sessions so you can see what I have been doing. This is one from Sunday.

 

ONE SESSION

 

 

 

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