After coming off my best meet performance of my career, I am now officially a beat up powerlifter. I'm having some minor low back issues that I'm working on mending up, and then I'll begin to find a competitive option. My goals for 2017 are to compete in a bodybuilding show and also get back to the platform 100% healthy.

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Well my training log is officially WAY overdue. Usually my log is a few days behind, but this is just a bit too much. So for those of you that enjoy keeping up with my logs, my apologies for basically being off the face of the planet. I try to keep my logs in as much order as possible, and I was hoping to get a video up of Week 6 training, but that just hasn't happened. I still do plan to get that done, but it's obviously going to be a few weeks behind. But perhaps that can help me elaborate on how things feel now.

Anyways, after all the low back pain and issues, I'll say that on this particular day, my low back was beginning to feel better. But I've still decided that I'm going to go the whole month with no spinal loading if at all possible (which I should be able to do). But even more, I just decided to kick the new year off with just a general deload based training week anyways. I figured I was banged up and probably could use the rest, so let's just keep the barbell out of my programming as much as possible. Still kept the volume at a moderate level, training what I could, and based upon how I felt. Nothing was overly heavy or strenuous. I was just happy to be training, in all honesty.

Between my low back, not competing, relationship setbacks, and still working on trying to find my place career wise (honestly this is the first time it's really started to get to me) I've got much more on my plate than I really wanted.

It's weird how training and life usually parallel. When one is going great, the other usually is...and vice versa. Things could certainly be worse, but my oh my, how things have done a 180 in the past 6 weeks or so.

So where am I to go from here. Just keep grinding away with the iron. Oh, and get this damn low back fixed. I'll have some more info later from the chiro and some movement specialists I know and hopefully I'll have an idea of the legit game plan besides "work around it and don't load my spine".

Items Used in this Training Session

Warm Up
Cats & Camels - 10
Quadraped T-Spine Ext - 10 each
Band Dislocations - 10
Alternating Band Dislocations - 10 each
Band Pressdowns - 15
Band Straight Arm Lat Pulldowns - 15
Band Face Pulls - 15
Single Arm Band Fly - 15 each
Band Rows - 15
Band Curls - 15

A1) DB Bench Press
5x20

B1) Incline Prone DB Flys
4x25

C1) Incline Crossbody Tricep Extensions
5x12

D1) V-Var Pressdowns
4x15

E1) Close Grip Push Ups
3 sets, max reps

F1) Face Pulls
4x20
F2) Lateral Raises
4x15

G1) Barbell Suitcase Hold
3x30 sec per side