Thursday, July 30, 2009

7-30

Training has been sporadic due to the move. Today was an ok day. I'll be going tomorrow as well because I'm not going to be able to work out during the weekend (we'll see about Sunday).

Sn. pp. + OHS 90/1+3 x 2 100/1+2 x 3 105/1+1 110/1+1 x 2
Hang sn. pull ab kn. 100/2 x 3 110/2 x 3

Pu J + OHS 92/2+2 x 2 102/2+1 102 - awkward set, kinda missed the jerk, kinda missed the squat. The close grip overhead squat was way harder than I thought it'd be.

Push jerk 102/2

Front squat + Jerk 105/1+2 only did one of these because my back was gone after all the other overhead work.

Bench 70/8 85/6 90/6 95/4 x 2 102/3 x 2 95/4 90/6 - triceps failed on the last rep. This was an especially brutal bench pyramid because I want to get in a lot of volume before I leave. I'll probably do overhead press tomorrow for high reps to get in some more volume.

Back squat 125/5 162/3 142/5 x 2 The 162 was really hard so I dropped the weight. I think this is just because I haven't squatted in awhile. I'm going to squat again tomorrow; I think I'll do some singles around 162 then back off and do sets of 5 again at 142.

Also, for awhile my squat has been quite a bit ahead of clean and jerk and so I didn't think it warranted much emphasis beyond what the program calls for. Being home has given me the chance to look at a few weightlifting books and check out the numbers. At around my weight my squat should be around 134% of my clean and jerk, which is much higher than I expected. Since I squatted only 180kg at the meet that makes my squat 136% of my clean and jerk. While I'm not concerned just yet with my squat it does point to my need to get stronger in general. I'd say upper body is still the bigger weak point (hence the bench and the overhead presses). Once I finish out this competition cycle I'm going to change my squat training to a more Sheiko-like program (as with bench) and continue overhead presses to bring my strength levels up to where I can more easily improve my Olympic lifts.

The last thing is, I'm not really sure what to do about front squats. The weightlifting program doesn't emphasise them much, and obviously Sheiko doesn't either. There's no reason I couldn't just switch the back squats to front squats, but they have little carryover to back squats, while back squats have good carryover to front squats. I don't want to lose strength for powerlifting either. I'm thinking that I could do the Sheiko-style program 3x a week, as prescribed, and do front squats once a week. The other option I'm considering is to split the program and whenever I would squat twice do front squats after (or front squats in a morning workout and back squats in the evening). Anyone have any thoughts?

3 comments:

Kyle said...

If you feel like your front squat is lagging behind, you could definetly add it in somewhere. I dont think your back squat would suffer too much if you swapped it out for front squatting once a week.

Also, when you say overhead pressing I assume you mean the jerks right? Or are you doing military/push pressing to beef up your shoulders?

Jake Ceccarelli said...

I'm doing military pressing and bench. I don't do push presses but obviously I do lots of jerks. In fact the overhead stuff is probably why my triceps failed on bench.

Juggernaut, the said...

I say you just double up the squatting and do whatever squatting is proscribed for both front and back squats...

Or if you're feeling mortal, just do what you suggested and alternate.