Today was a squat day at Apollon.

Since we follow a conjugate program and rotate our max effort exercises, I generally don't know what we are doing until I actually get to the gym. I usually structure things a bit more leading up to a meet, but between training cycles, I kind of like not knowing, because I feel like it keeps me from being obsessive, and teaches me to go with the flow and be ready for anything. This actually came in handy at the last meet when I had to change suits 3 times during warmups, before going out and hitting a pr squat.

Sometimes though, this approach sucks when the exercise happens to be something I hate, as was the case today. for starters, I walked into the gym and saw that the Yolk bar was already in the rack. Crap. Not my favorite by a long shot. I then found out that we would be working up on a box with a band. This was not going to be fun. I suck at this bar on a good day and a band was not going to help.

Here's how it went:

Bar x a few after some back extensions to warm up.

Average band for 5

155 x 2

245 x 1

295 x 1

335 x 1

Rather than a brief, I put my Ace suit bottoms on because I need to start breaking them in. They were a little loose because I will be wearing them over a brief, but I knew it would be enough since I tend to be limited by my back on these, not my hips.

385 x 1

425 x 1

475 x 1

495 x 1

515 x 1

This rep was TOUGH! It took everything I had, and after it was done, I was shot.

Looking back in my log, This is the most I've done on this exercise in a  long time, maybe ever. The last time I hit 515 was in march, and this was without the band. So although ti was hard, it was actually a very good day.

After the squats, I decided to do some very light good mornings with the yolk bar. Up to this point, my back has not been able to handle these, even with stupid light weights, but since I've been feeling good, I wanted to give them a go. I only worked up to a couple of sets with 135, but there was no pain, so I am going to start gradually increasing the weight on these. I do miss being able to do them because I felt stronger, especially in the deadlift when I could handle them.

Next up was 4 sets on the reverse hyper, then 4 more sets of pulldown abs.

I spent the rest of the day groggy and waddling around like my son after baking a fresh diaper biscuit.

I hate that damn bar.