Sunday was a lower body day At Apollon, and due to the massive storm, only about half of us were able to make it in (the four of us with 4x4 cars/trucks... it was still pretty bad on the roads). Anthony was programmed for a rack pull off of pin 3 and since I have not hit a heavy pull in a long time, I decided to join him.
On one hand, I kind of regret it, as it was a terrible day. On the other, It was a wake-up call that I badly needed.
I worked up to 405. That't it. 405. Not because I decide to stop there, but because I couldn't budge 455 off the pins.
I knew that it would take some time to get my lower back strength back up to par after the layoff, but I had no idea how bad my strength had gotten. It felt like I just couldn't get tight enough at the bottom to develop the force to break the bar off the pins.
Between years of abuse, and two layoffs in the last year or so, My back strength has withered away to nothing, and now I have to figure out how to get it back. I know from experience, that raising up my deadlift volume beats me to hell (and started the series of injuries that caused the layoffs in the first place). But obviously infrequent pulling isn't helping matters either.
The plan for now is to start drastically ramping up my lower back assistance work (which has worked in the past) to the point where I'm training my back just about every day, using the typical exercises like back extensions, reverse hypers, pullthroughs, and glute ham raises. Basically I'll do whatever I have access to on that day. I will also do abdominal work on a daily basis, as well as spinal stability stuff, like planks and bird dogs.
As my training partner Paper pointed out, it's going to take a long time to get back to 100% this way (he loves being the bearer of bad news), but at this point, I believe it's the only option. I've been lifting weights for around 25 years now, so I have zero reservations about taking my time on this. maybe I'll be 100% for Worlds, and maybe I won't, but I'll be a hell of a lot closer than I am now.