I haven't' posted in over two months. I have still been hitting the gym regularly but honestly there for a while I was just kind of going through the motions and not making any real progress. Here in the last couple of weeks that has changed.
I read something on T-Nation about how you can sabotage your workout by doing too many warm-up sets, so I tried cutting back on my warm-ups and got to the working weight faster. I saw a difference immediately in my workouts by doing this. I think by doing so many warm-ups I was just fatiguing myself so much that I didn't have the energy to lift heavy weight when I finally got around to my working sets.
My working weight has improved steadily over the last few weeks with this new approach. I've blown past my PR in deadlift and I'm quickly getting back to my best-ever squat weight. I was even able to get past my sticking point on bench press and get back up over 200 pounds again for the first time in a few years. On bench I realized I had my grip too wide by about 2". When I brought the grip in the difference was immediate and I was able to get up 185 x 5 without struggle when previously I had been struggling to even get 5 with 175 pounds. I felt so good that night I threw on 205 pounds just to see if I could do it and got 2 reps up unassisted.
I've given up on the barbell military press for now. I don't know if it was my grip width or just my wrists but every time I did the exercise I would have shooting pain in my left wrist. For now I'm just focusing on doing dumbbell presses and it's going well so far.
Last week I also had my body fat measured at our gym. It was the old fashioned caliper pinch test, and my results came in much lower than I was expecting. I was thinking I'd land around 18-20% and instead he said I was 14.7%. I am still thinking this number is off by at least 2-3% but I guess it gives me a reference point for later tests. The test was free since we are members, so I will have to have another test done in a couple of months and see if I've made any progress. I really should start doing some cardio but I can't quite bring myself to do that yet. So boring!
squat - 245 lbs
deadlift - 275 lbs
bench - 205 lbs
press - 60x2 lbs (dumbbells)
