Sat, 18 April 15

I was across the bridge this weekend with my girlfriend visiting her parents, so I got to train at Colosseum Gym in Columbia, MD with my friend and training partner, Nick O'Brien.  If you live in Maryland and have not been to Colosseum to train for strongman yet, pull your head out of your arse and get there pronto!  It is by far the best gym in the state to train at for strongman.  For that matter, if you live in Washington, DC, northern VA, DE, or PA, go there if you get the chance.  There are very few facilities that can boast the ability to train moving events indoors in addition to having a crap ton of equipment and implements.

Today was designed to be a "lighter" training day to work on my "endurance."  Note that lighter just means heavy weight for more reps or longer distance rather than actually being any easier than a heavy event training day.  And just as I suspected, my conditioning for longer duration events is terrible.  The good news is that I know exactly how to remedy the situation.

Log Clean & Jerk (clean each rep)

complex x 70

complex x 120

complex x 155

3x205

2x7x235 - I don't think I've done more than a double of cleaning each rep on log in months, maybe over a year.  It definitely showed in my paltry rep totals with a weight that I should be able to hit 9 or 10 times in 60 seconds.  At least I was consistently awful.  Also, even when I have done multiple clean and jerks, I have not done them for time, so I discovered that I was getting all kinds of sloppy with my technique in my attempt to try and get more reps within the time limit.  Shameful.

Car Deadlift

barbell warmups: 8x135, 5x225, 5x315

1xcar

5xcar

10xcar - Added belt and straps, could have kept going, but I was starting to round my back a little on number 9 and a little more on number 10 so I stopped.  The video was mostly just black due to the open bay door in the background messing with the light levels on the camera lens so it was sadly left out.

Yoke (drop and repick at 50')

50'x250

100'x360

100'x450

100'x540

100'x630

100'x720 - I had valgus knee movement on my repicks because I was fatigued and trying to hurry, which ended up with my picks suffering so I had Nick yell at me on the last one and it helped a lot.

Atlas Stone Series

3x250 to 56"

300 to 48", 250 to 52", 240 to 56" - This is the second week in a row that I have made a stupid mistake on the order of atlas stones.  My brain must really be shutting down toward the end of my training sessions.  Thankfully it was just a warmup set this time.

240 to 56", 250 to 52", 300 to 48", 350 to 44" - Tackyless

250 to 56", 300 to 52", 350 to 48", miss x 400 - Again with my brain not doing its job to prevent my own stupidity, I decided to tack up on the last set and add in a 22" diameter, 400 lb stone to the end of my series.  It was dusty as hell and I slid right off when I went to pick it off the floor so I stopped and called it a day.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJVUSt2eh5Y]

Thanks go out to Colosseum Gym in general for being awesome and Jon Ward, Andy Shaddeau, and Nick Arbia in particular for their help to Nick and I on our stone training since we had no idea what the stone weights were and I forgot to bring my tacky box from home.