Where have I been? What has been going on?
I will start by saying, altogether this year has been a struggle up to this point. I have been at least partially sick since the end of 2017, up until the past two weeks maybe. So with that said, after trying to push through the sickness for almost two months I decided I just needed to stop this cycle. Therefore, my training has been taken down a few notches and isn’t what I would classify as very interesting. That is why I have not been writing my blog posts as promised. Now I am at the point where I believe I am more or less back to normal training, so I will fill you in on what I’ve done during this rebuild.
Obviously I competed at the beginning of this year, on January 13th, and then proceeded to get sick with the flu the following week… not fun. Tried to just take a day off from the gym and get back at it thinking I was healthy again, but that was not the case. Struggled with manageable sickness for another week and half or so before getting really sick again… but this time I took almost a full week off and made sure I was getting recovered fully.
At this point it was basically the beginning of March. I decided it was time to get back to training but did not want to jump into what would normally be a higher volume phase following my meet. Simply because a taxing high volume day is much more difficult to recover from than a lower volume slightly high intensity workout. So I changed my workout plan to such. Lowering reps on everything and not even increasing the weight to start. I did that slowly over the next few weeks. I also switched back from highbar squats to low bar and was presently surprised how my low bar strength was after not doing a lowbar squat since my meet. But I used this transition to drop back on the volume and intensity of my squat workouts since I was getting used to the different bar path of lowbar again. I also cut out SSB squats after another week or so because my knees were feeling the months of Highbar + SSB + Sumo Deadlifting. The other way I cut down on the fatigue I was subjecting my body to was by using paused deadlifts, making the exercise harder with lighter weights and saving my CNS.
Now we are at the 4th week of linearly loading my heavy squat day and my squat has been moving better and better every week. I have also started using Conventional deadlifts in my programming again. Although I have struggled with conventionally deadlifting twice a week in the past, using paused conventional deadlifts following a top set of 1-3 reps allows me to get desired volume while minimizing form breakdown that causes fatigue carryover to other deadlift workouts and squat sessions.
I plan on this weekend’s squat workout to go well, and if it goes well enough I may have a test workout for my squat to see where it stands the following weekend.