Monday was a max effort bench season at Apollon.
The exercise for the day was a bench press with a reverse average (gray) band.
I'm still feeling pretty weak raw, and today was no exception, but that's just the result of finishing a meet cycle and starting from square 1. Not to mention losing a few pounds.
Started with the bar for a bunch, then went:
95 x 5
135 x 5
185 x 5
Added band
225 x 1
275 x 1
315 x 1
365 x 1
405 x 1
425 x 1
Most of the guys were getting around an 80ish lb boost from the bands, which would put me at around 345 right now. Probably not far off, which is way off my best, but I have a few months to address it. As an experiment I'm going to be adding speed bench back to my program, so hopefully this will have a positive effect. I haven't done it in years, so we'll see what it brings.
After benching, I did some seated overhead pressing. To shake things up a little, and to relieve some stress on my hands (which were beat up from a little too much grip work) I used the fat bar.
Got o 4 sets of 10 with 155. Not heavy, but my shoulders get fried easily, so I like to ease into training them hard.
Finished wth 4 sets of 12 pulldowns, and 4 sets of 15 on the dip machine.