No one likes bad workouts. Most of us are good at keeping things in perspective and just moving on. But once a bad training day stretches out into weeks or even months, even a veteran can start to second guess themselves.

The key to breaking through an extended funk is carefully evaluating  your situation without freaking the f*ck out, and doing something drafting that will set you back even more (like program hopping).

The last couple of weeks served as a good reminder that a few bad weeks mean nothing in the grand scheme of your training.

My training has been in kind of a lull over the last few weeks, starting with catching a bad cold earlier in the month. While I knew my training was crap due to the illness, it was still difficult to be patient, stay the course, and let my training do it's job.

after almost a month of sub-par workouts, this past week was one of the best I've had in many years.

Saturday was a squat session, and my exercise for the day was a free squat with 3 sets of chain. Frankly, it started off as a disaster. For starters, I have a suit that I had sent out for alterations get lost in the mail. It was supposed to be delivered on the 21st, and in time for this session but now a week later, It's still hung up in Fargo somewhere. So I had to use a spare canvas, which has already blown out and been repaired. The repair job is good, but I never totally trust gear once it's been compromised.

It's still a good suit however, and I wasn't going to let this stop me. Everything was going smoothly until I blew out my favorite Ace briefs, and had to continue in a set of Jacks that are a little bit big for me since I moved down to 198.

Then a funny thing happened. As I moved up in bar weight, it never really seemed to get all that much heavier. My form was good, and the suit was really holding me up nicely in the hole. My last planned set was 690, which with the chain, is probably somewhere around 800 at the top. It moved too well not to take another.

Threw a 25 on and took 740. Smoked it again.

Bumped it up to 780 and took one more. It was heavy, but I got it down to parallel and made it.

On any normal day, working up to 780 in the gym would be good, because it's only 30 less than my pr. Never mind the extra 120lbs of chain.

Considering I'm still about 10 weeks out from the XPC Finals, this puts me in a VERY good position!

 

Tonight was a bench day.

Since I will be out of town and will miss a few sessions, I decided to do another full gear day with chains to really beat the hell out of my self and basically force myself to take the week off as a deload.

The goal was to work up full range with 3 sets of chain.

After the heavy chain squatting 2 days ago I was pretty beat up. My arms and elbows hurt and the weight felt heavy in my hands.

Still had a great day regardless.

Worked up to 575 + 120lbs of chain.


So after numerous weeks of my training being kind of in the crapper, I was able to pull together two of the best workouts I've ever had.

Sometimes the best thing you can do to deal with a few off weeks is just hang back, keep doing the right things and and wait it out.