Maximum max bench day

Had to help people move, so I did a quick bench workout at 8:30am.

Bench:
275 x 5
285 x 5
295 x 5

4-board Bench:
365 x 5
405 x 5
455 x 0-2? I might have gotten these up. Or the spotter touched them. Or i pushed the board up. They went up, but they were sloowwwo and sloppy. I was out of my groove on them.

2-board Bench:
315 x 5
335 x fail (totally out of the groove, lost my breath, etc.)
335 x 5 (success!)

Lessons learner: groove is important on board presses. Also, trying to really spread my pecs wide has helped me engage them more at the bottom and gives me a quicker transition to triceps. I think I feel the thing that Phil has always mentioned about shrugging and engaging the traps, except I'm not trying to do that. Instead i feel them just get bunched up when I try to bring the bar down with a bunch of stress on the pecs (in a good way). Perhaps it's the same thing? Either way, I'm learning a lot about my bench by trying these heavier weights. The fact that after after 4 heavy sets, I can get 5 reps for 20lbs better thanmy raw max off a 2-board says something about where my weakness is, hahaha.

Then I did a quick finish with 4 supersets of flyes and front raises. Tried to go heavy on the flyes still to work those pecs.

Cardio:

So after the gym I helped two people move. The first person had the idea moving experience. Everything was boxed up and ready to go. Two quick trips. Nothing awkward like a couch or a giant desk. Took maybe 90 minutes of moving, and 60 minutes of travel, so not bad.

Then I helped a second person move. Oh man, the exact opposite. I show up and find out that I'm helping my friend and her roommate move out. Also, they just started packing. Also, I'm the only one there. So basically they packed while I moved everything in their apt. down from the third floor by myself. I think this is karma from what I put Phil through this year, haha. Oh man, my friends were packrats to the nth degree: huge filing cabnets full of every paper they had ever written, giant blue foam sleeper mattresses, two broken bikes, a my little pony doll from when one was young. Srsly. It was two trips for 3 cars. And they didn't even have any couches. Just an apartment of infinite stuff. I think it took around 8 hours for the move. At the end, there were 5 of us moving stuff out the cars and vans into storage. Cardio is awesome.

Also, the broken rib is at 90%. I'll try to do some form of squatting with it tomorrow and see how it goes. It hurts only when stretch it now, but not when I'm picking things up, so I think it's healing up fairly well.