More about what I need to work on based on the last meet cycle. Here is part 1 for your edification.
My bod
Moving forward the next few weeks I will be working on hypertrophy and building up my lower back and ass muscles (that is the scientific terminology).
I won’t do any barbell work for about 4-6 weeks. I will write more about what exactly I am doing in the logs to come.
In terms of the shit I need to fix with my body:
1) keep getting my low back better. Obviously it was good to go for the meet but one side is was still feeling a little weird the whole meet cycle so I’ll keep working on it at Hybrid Performance and with low back work in the gym
2) Deez elbows. They hurt.
Which rolls into
3) My shoulder posture. I have those really smushed forward, rounded shoulders. Which has been fine for deadlifting but total shit for everything else. As you can see from my squat videos, my elbows are on a different plane of existence than the rest of my body. So a lot of my elbow issues are probably stemming from that. If I fix the shoulders, it will hopefully be a triple whammy- less elbow pain, better back tightness for squatting, better shoulder smushing together for benching.
Apparently I also have thoracic park syndrome which is why my arms and hands go numb on the reg.
Ok it’s actually called thoracic outlet syndrome aka Jurassic outlet syndrome which is what I thought happened at a dinosaur park when someone turns the power off and the dinosaurs become DINEosaurs.
Tyrel at Hybrid Performance will be SHOULDERING that responsibility.
Bonus picture of my mom reading and my dad playing scrabble on his phone at the meet
Other points of relevance
This training cycle around, we will try to do more with less weight. As Dave put it, we want to get the best results using the least amount of weight. He thinks that I could have gotten to the same level of strength for the meet without benching 315 or squatting 500 (or over with reverse bands) in training but the issue was my confidence. That I needed to hit those to mentally be prepared to handle the same or more at the meet. I need to be able to be confident that I am getting stronger without actually hitting close to what I might hit in a meet. Another aspect to that is having indicator lifts that act as a gauge of where your main lifts are and I am still working on figuring those out.
I remember between my second and third bench attempts when we were trying to figure out what to do after missing my second, Dave thought we should take it to 315. He asked if I thought I could do it because if not, we should just pass on third attempts. I was fucking mad and would have taken pretty much anything at the time but I remember telling him “Yes. I’ve already fucking done it”. I want to be able to say that without actually having touched the weight. Get to the point where I’ve already done it mentally.
It’s hard for me to gauge where I am with those mental aspects because I only know what I have experienced. So I don’t always know what in my mentality needs to change or how to base my training on where I am at. I am not very cognizant of the fact that I needed to hit certain weights in training to feel good about them at the meet. But Dave knows it and made decisions accordingly. That’s also a commonly overlooked aspect of great coaching- being able to assess, guide, and make decisions based on your lifter’s mental state. It doesn’t necessarily mean amp up your lifters or dial them back if they are getting over excited. But know how to program based on where they are in their mental development as a lifter.
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