APF Nationals - Michigan June 12
Training
We are in the last 5 weeks of this training block before the meet and some weird stuff happened that you all will laugh about while shaking your head. So, we bought a new house right, well that comes along with responsibility. One of those responsibilities being, maintaining the house including gutters. Well, we have a ton of trees that have helicopters and crap that falls into gutters and the tree limbs hang out over the house which required me to go get one of those long branch trimmers. These suckers are neat but holding a 14 ft pool trying to stabilize it F'D my forearms up BAD. No seriously, it's to the point where my wrists are in pain and doing a push-up is almost a no go and my arms after straight bar squatting are mad! Consulted with Julia and we decided to swap the bar to an SSB so my shoulders and arms could get a little extra of a break.
Perspective
Along with calling the audible of above for my arms, after combing through the program, I also realized we have not had a lot of hip dominant exercises in training. It's been weeks since we went wide stance max effort, weeks since we had hip dominant accessory work, and we are about to roll into our peak. Well, with DE day being a great day to implement repetition and get some quality sets in we decided to widen our stance and take it to parallel. These actually felt great and really aided with recovery from ME Monday WHICH IS ALSO THE PURPOSE of this day reinforcing it was a good call.
Coaching
EliteFTS youtube podcast Episode 10 with Wendler and Rhodes is a great listen, there is a segment in there that they talk about communication. Rhodes recalled the days he trained housewives liked football players and made no money. Also, the struggle of talking with other coaches in the collegiate setting where they looked at him like a dumb gorilla although knew what the players needed. Wendler shared his story of not being able to get through to other coaches and athletes as well. This is a learned skill and work has to be put into it, similarly, communication with your body is also a learned skill.
During the last 6 months, I have gotten a lot of feedback from my body as was forced to listen to it. If you scroll back in my logs you will see MANY audibles that we called due to my body being pissed off. Start listening and you will be rewarded with strength and how you feel also, remember, this will require patience as it may be like a foreign language to you at first.
Workout
Speed SSB Box Squat (all way down 1 grey) 12x2 40% (235) + 6 chains
Speed Deads 15x1 40% (250) + 6 chains
Step ups Slow eccentric 3x10:
DB RB good-mornings 2x20:
Reverse Hypers 100 swings
Video