100. in Whey and Sonic Screwdrivers.

Yesterday was a High Gravity Day™ in terms of deadlifts. Really, my grip kept giving out. Well. Felt like it might. Last thing I want is the bar slipping out of my hand mid-lift. That’s asking for an injury. I’m an idiot, but not a complete idiot - I’ll stop a set before risking injury.

I still feel it’s more my hand sweating than my actual grip strength, but whatever.

I ordered straps and they’re due to arrive today. I can’t wait to put my straps on.

Anyway, weighted pull-ups aside, my other main movement today was OHP. I hit full sets a week early. A part of me is “I’ve done this before”, but that’s me downplaying. I spent too much in the echo chamber of “If you aren’t benching 5 plates by the time your second ballhair grows in, go kill yourself.”

Okay, it’s never said like that, but far too many bros aren’t realistic.

Pressing 100 lbs is still 100 lbs.

(4x6 @ 100 lbs, for brevity.)

I keep looking back at my previous workouts, and wonder “What would have happened if I didn’t just stick with what I was doing.”

It always pissed me off. I’d hit some good marks, then… Feel mentally burned out, or decided to back off and work my way back up. At least I have a decade of retrospect. I used to fret over how backcycling a week would set me back so far.

I’ve been doing my own thing and figuring out what I’m doing later. Turns out I’m doing wave loading for squats/deads, and step loading for all the rest of my lifts.

I know nobody will watch it, but I listen to shit like this as background noise. The smart strong guys almost always have a skill in math interpretation. You have to. Exercise is nothing more than executing the scientific method, n=1, collecting data, and interpreting the results. The thesis statements, while founded in science, sometimes get permutated into what we generally call broscience.

I digress.

I gotta compare me against me. If you approximate a strength improvement curve, it is more of an logarithmic progression than linear progression.

Anyway, as far as step progression goes. In the past, I employed what is known as “double progression”. Hit a set/rep, such as 4x6. Increase the weight. Then in successive workouts, improve on repetitions until you hit 4x6 again. 6,4,3,3, then 6,5,4,4, then 6,6,6,5, then 6,6,6,6, for example. Seems obvious, but I didn’t know there a name for it until this past year.

In years past, this started stressing me out because different lifts would progress at different rates. I’d play it forward “but if I don’t hit the mark this week…” I started thinking about how many weeks it would take to “get back” to a certain weight if I backcycled.

This time, while 4x6 is my goal, I’m making the determiner for whether I increase the weight simply whether I get 6 in the first set. That’s it. Backcycle if I can’t hit 6 with a new weight in three consecutive sessions.

It sounds obvious, but adding 5 lbs isn’t much. If I’ve been hitting a weight 3 weeks in a row, my body had adapted to the weight, and 5 lbs is a mere 5% more.

We’ll see what happens. I ran 5/3/1 for 8 cycles and I’d like to beat that mark. I never liked the AMRAP sets. It never made me feel like I had sustainable, repeatable strength.

It’s one thing to say you can 1RM a weight. It’s another to know you can hit it for sets.

Anyway, another blathering entry nobody will read, ha ha. Mostly for me, anyway.

By the way, I have a degree in exercise science, and other than statistical analysis, most of what I’m spewing I simply didn’t learn in a classroom.

By the way, Happy First Contact Day.