Throat and ears not hurting so bad now and no fever or headache now. I still feel quite weak and tired though but definitely on the mend.
Curious to get back to the gym and see how much strength I have lost. Weight wise I am down 2.5kg’s/5.5lbs (97.5kg), which considering how bad I was feeling, isn’t too bad. Started to feel ill on the Saturday night (28th August), so have been sick for 6 days so far.
Have gone down with some kinda throat infection. Feel like dirt – Doctor has prescribed the usual course of antibiotics. First time I have been sick for a while, touchwood it doesn’t last too long.
Lower back has been sore since Tuesday, I have been holding off training until tonight (Thursday) in the hope it would improve. Unfortunately it hasn’t but as I will be busy for the next few days, this is the only opportunity I will have to train till probably Monday/Tuesday.
The plan was to do week 2/phase 2 on bent rows and also throw in some squats.
First decision was whether to do squats to start with followed by rows or vice versa, decided to do squats first. Secondly I was thinking that there was no way my back could handle a rep max at the planned 145kg, so instead thought I would aim for a manageable triple. I was pretty confident even with a sh*tty back that I could manage 150kg for 3+ reps considering the 9 reps I did 6 days ago with 140kg. So 150kg it was and a good choice too, as I got the triple without any hassle or drama, apart from the back getting tighter.
Moving onto the bent rows, my lower back wasn’t feeling too good and I couldn’t get into a comfortable rowing position. I also forget my percentages and weight I was meant to use, I guestimated it should be 137.5kg and I was hoping for 7-8 reps, 6 reps was all I could get though, which sucks big time! Turns out I should have been aiming for 132.5kg, so that is probably a contributing factor for my crap-ness.
F*ck it, not the end of the world and my back pain isn’t terminal. Next week is another story. 3-4 days off now, recharge and come back hard. No miscalculations, 100% focused and boom! Target weight for bent rows will be 140kg for max reps and I want 6 reps minimal.
Finished off with some light weight pump sets on cable rows.
Back squats – breaking parallel
20kg x 5, 5
60kg x 5, 5
80kg x 5
100kg x 5
120kg x 2
140kg x 1
150kg x 3
Bent rows
60kg x 5, 5
80kg x 5
110kg x 3
117.5kg x 3
137.5kg x 6
Curl grip pulldowns
35kg x 10
65kg x 8
100kg x 11
Single arm standing cable rows
12.5kg x 10
20kg x 10
27.5kg x 12, 12, 12
Dilemma, to train bench during the weekend when I know I will be sleepy but the equipment is available. Alternatively, to train weekdays when I know I will have to wait at least 45mins, coz a couple of divs are doing 25 sets of flat bench using assisted/forced reps on weights far too heavy for them and shouting “all you man”?
Easy choice really. So back to today’s bench session, 2 days of sleep deprivation and I tell you man – I am seriously sleepy! My baby keeps waking up and as I haven’t got work the next day I am on night duty. Today for example, she was up at about 4am and wouldn’t go back down in her cot, so I was cuddling her till breakfast (6:30am).
As you would expect, I was one of the first people in the gym and it was empty which is usual for a Sunday morning. Done some extra warm up sets to try and improve my technique as I still can’t find the “Groove”. Again I didn’t feel very stable and missed my target reps of 5 @ 125kg. Infact this 125kg felt heavier than the 4 reps I did after the close grip benches 3 weeks ago??? I knew it was going to be a bad day as even the bar on it’s own felt heavy.
Not too bothered as I know I was tired, also with a bit of luck, my baby will settle back into a decent sleep pattern soon, which means I shouldn’t be so tired – it was only the diarrhoea and a cold that has messed her sleeping up.
Decided to do some overhead pressing for the first time in months and will keep it a regular thing after the flat benches and see if that helps.
Going forward I will skip the deload next week and go straight back into week 1, phase 2 of the programme. Below are my max weight sets for the coming 3 weeks:
Week 1 – 115kg
Week 2 – 122.5kg
Week 3 – 130kg
Depending on how that goes, I will make a judgement call on deloading in week 4.
Unfortunately I didn’t really have many junk food opportunities as we went walking in the woods yesterday (funnily enough, not many fast food joints here) and the in-laws came round for Sunday lunch today.
Only managed – large pack of tortilla chips, sour cream & chive dip, 2 packs of crisps/potato chips, 3 fig rolls, 2 blueberry muffins, 4 hot dogs, handful of chocolate minstrels, peanut brittle bar and that was about it.
Flat bench press
20kg x 8, 6
60kg x 6, 5
80kg x 3
100kg x 5
110kg x 3
125kg x 4
Seated front press
20kg x 10
60kg x 6
80kg x 5
Seated laterals
10kg x 8
17.5kg x 12, 10
Lying cable laterals
5kg x 8
10kg x 15
Dips
Bodyweight x 22, 12
My back was feeling good today, so with the phrase “make hay whilst the sun shines” in mind, I decided to do some squats today. I know I only done squats on Sunday (today is Friday) but I was never one to stick to 1 body part per week, if you feel ok, then why not go for it?
Only thing were my hamstrings were still slightly sore but f*ck it, I could wake up tomorrow and my back could be feeling shitty, which means no squatting.
Anyway’s, remember I said in Sunday’s post that I thought I had an easy 10 reps, turns out I was talking shit. Only managed 9 reps today. The plan going forward (touchwood my back and hip stay good) is to increase the weight weekly, until I hit a 5 rep max and then do a deload week and start again the following week with a lighter weight and build up. Basically, very similar in principle to the 5/3/1 I am doing on flat bench and bent rows.
Oh before I forget, a big shout out to my mate Kayster – stay strong Arnie!
Back Squats – breaking parallel
20kg x 6
60kg x 5, 5
80kg x 5
100kg x 5
120kg x 2
140kg x 9
Stiff legged deadlifts – using 10kg plates for greater range of motion
60kg x 6
80kg x 5
100kg x 3
120kg x 2
140kg x 7
Foam rolling 15mins
Wow we have some speed back, I decided to move hosting companies again after my nightmare month with GoDaddy. I am with www.justhostme.co.uk and they are pretty decent. Their support is a load better and also the speed of serving up web pages is about a million times faster.
I also finally took the plunge and have moved over to WordPress, I use WordPress for some of my other websites as a CMS and have always liked it. For what it is, it is pretty powerful and if it is good enough to power Techcrunch, Mashable, Nasa, Spotify etc, it is definately good enough for me!
Before I got into wordpress, I decided to use BlogEngine.Net as it was coded in .NET with c# and an MS SQL back end. The theory here, is because I am pretty decent .NET developer, even if I do say so myself was that I could do any customizations pretty easily and quickly. The reality was I never had to do any development i.e. how complicated can a blog be? Anything out of the norm is usually catered for by plug-ins.
So what was my driver behind it – pure economics, basically LAMP hosting is usually a lot cheaper than a Microsoft package. Unless you go with someone like GoDaddy and then you get what you pay for. WordPress is best run on LAMP servers whilst BlogEngine requires a Microsoft box.
Funny thing though, is my brother uses GoDaddy for his website and it performs ok, I think it maybe just the luck of the draw. If internet speculation is to be believed, then on the amount of websites they host on a single shared server, you probably only need to be sharing with a few high traffic sites and you are buggered.
Also as I have become more familiar with WordPress maintaing my other websites, I have picked up a bit of php, so am more than comfortable doing any customizations that maybe required (probably nothing on this site as it is only a blog). The process of importing the data over from a MS Sql database to a mySQL database with a different schema was painless because, guess what – they have a plug-in that handles it! Double bonus - WordPress even has a 301 redirect plug-in, this meant I could easily set up 301′s on 50 of my most visited pages.
Anyways I am pretty happy now that speed has been restored and as an added bonus I have moved over to WordPress. You maybe saying to yourself that it is not fair to compare speeds between a WordPress and Blogengine website on different hosting providers, my argument is that I had a WordPress site running on that GoDaddy package and it was even slower than this blog, infact it would time out quite a lot when requesting a web page!!
By the way I have nothing bad to say about BlogEngine.Net, it done what it said it would do on the box – good stuff!
