Sat, 24 Nov 18
Events @ the Unit
Today was a solid training day all around, but it started off with a subpar warmup. I forgot to bring bands with me to the Unit so I had to skip some stuff and sub in some other stuff. The upshot was that I felt warmed up, but I wasn't performing like it.
Yoke
4x50'x250
2x50'x450
3x50'x540 - Video of 1st and 3rd
50'x630
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2x50'x700
2x50'x540
I did 4 runs initially with the empty yoke because I felt slow and awful. Then the first run with 450 felt worse, but the second felt better, though still slow. Having been doing strongman for 12 years now, I know that sometimes you feel slow even when you're not, so I setup my phone to video my next run at 530 to check my speed. It was really slow.
A "good" time for a 50' yoke run, especially one that is still a light warmup weight, is sub 8 seconds. My first run with 540 was 10+ sec (left video). That was unacceptable and if I had kept working up, I would have gotten much slower and training would have sucked and I would likely have been pissing and moaning like a sad sack of crap. Instead, I rested a few minutes and repeated the weight. The second run was better at just over 9 sec, but still way too slow for me to feel good about moving forward with my warmups. Finally on the 3rd run, I got my time down to a little over 7 seconds (right video), which was still somewhat on the slow side, but good enough to go back to my planned/normal warmups. Obviously, as the weight increased my time slowed down again and my time for my first run at 700 was fairly slow, back up over 10 seconds. I gave it a second run because often, especially when I am fortunate enough to be training with people who can push me, I will improve my speed the second time around. However that as not the case today and my second 700 lb yoke run was slow(er) than the first. At this point I knew I had topped out for the day so I dropped down for a couple of back off runs before switching gears to atlas stones.
The moral of the story is that having a plan is all well and good, but you need to be able to adapt to various circumstances, including proverbially having sand in your nether regions, in order to maximize the benefit from the work you put in. This generally is something that takes years of training to actually be able to do, or even to be aware that changes need to be made. If you are more than a casual enthusiast of strength sports, your mission should be to seek out someone stronger, faster, better, and/or more experienced than you and get them to help you with your training. In person.
No online coach is going to be able to be there with you live to tell you to stop and repeat some warmup sets or hit a couple sets of band TKEs if your knees are feeling janky to get them bending and straightening like a well-oiled machine. Sure, the better ones may be able to offer helpful advice after the fact when you've completed a crappy training session where you made no progress and maybe tweaked something because you were trying to comply with the training program they wrote you regardless of how you felt or how good or bad you were performing. But most of them suck fat, hairy testicles and take your hard-earned sheckles in return for cookie cutter programs with no adjustments ever. Rant over. Back to my awesome training.
Stone Over Bar (tackyless)
2x1x200 over 57"
3x200 over 57"
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3x200 over 59"
3x200 over 61"
3x240 over 61"
These felt great and I would have bumped up to the 280 stone, but I need to bring it back from Iron Strong.
Log C&J (clean once)
extra long complex x 85
complex x 135
complex x 185
2x205
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2x225
2x235
2x2x250 - Video of second set
My goal for the day was 2x220 or better. Everything felt outstanding as I was warming up and once I hit 225 with no pain or problems, I couldn't stop there. I had to really work to make myself stop at 250 instead of working up to a max double today. Everything was feeling great and moving smoothly, but I know my shoulder is still not back to 100% and being stupid with pressing heavy weight was how I turned a minor annoyance into a stupid shoulder injury that has taken a couple months to fix instead of a couple weeks. So it looks like my main press training day will be shifting back to more normal programming for sure starting next week with some speed work.
Prowler High/Lows
6x{50'xprowler + 90 high handles/50'xprowler + 90 low handles}
I stopped after 6 runs in little under 6 minutes because it was starting to rain and I had to hustle to get everything cleaned up and back in the Unit.