Friday: Upper B. in Exerbabble III

Cycle I, Week I: Upper B

Yesterday's nutrition: Good.
Last night's sleep: Good.

GYM STUFF:

light foam rolling

BB Bench Press: 5 @ 45, 95, 115 lbs
5, 5, 7 @ 135 lbs
DB One-Arm Row: 5 @ 55 lbs; 3 @ 65 lbs
3x5 @ 75 lbs

Seated DB Press: 5 @ 25 lbs
3x8 @ 40 lbs
Pull-ups:
8, 6, 6 @ 135 lbs

Reverse Fly: 3x10 @ 10 lbs
Incline Fly: 3x10 @ 15 lbs

Cable Lateral Raise: 3x12 @ 7 lbs

upper stretching

Crux of workout: 60 minutes

My bench warm-ups take a bit more than my pressing or chin warm-ups, that’s for sure. But I’ve learned over the years that if I don’t warm up probably, my workouts don’t go as well. Especially with squats and deads, I have a mental block at times with treating warm-ups with full effort. I get this false idea that they’ll “tire” me, when it’s simply never the case. If I just fly through my warm-ups, they don’t do me much good. But if I treat each as if it’s a work set, cue my tempo exactly as I want it to be, I mentally get set a bit more. Whenever I do one-arm rows, I tend to row my empty hand in the air. Doing so seems to mentally set me up to know where my arm “should” be going. Regardless, felt strongest in my second and third sets of bench. Bodes well for me, as I’m expecting to start to struggle around 155 or 160 lbs, this feels easy as it should be.

I never annotate it anywhere, but I always do a set or two of external rotations after my first (and second) warm-up sets. Typically just grab a set of 5 lb plates and bang out a controlled set of 12. Part of warm-ups is to identify if there’s any contraindications to lifting. If I ever had a pain while doing external rotations, you better damn believe I wouldn’t bench that day. Perhaps I could go heavier on them, but I don’t need to piss myself doing external rotations. I think it’s the chronic performance of them (external rotations) which helps, not necessarily the weight itself.

First time I’ve programmed non-weighted pull-ups in a gym-setting in a while. I’ve found it disheartening over the years how hard it is to add reps. But I wanted a vertical pull in the 8ish range, and doing pronated lat pulls feels awkward.

To reiterate, I’ve never really tried to progress on isolation exercises before. Just kind of tossed in over the years. I’m doing the reverse flys by standing backwards on the incline bench, to eliminate body english. Holy shit, my posterior delts are weak. If I were a raw beginner, I’d give myself a lecture about how it doesn’t matter, just do rows and shit. But jesus, I think I’ve leveled up my weighted chins and rows enough, my posterior delt isn’t going to grow with my lats being so freaking strong. I’m actually going to lower the weight, as I didn’t feel like I was getting the weight high enough. Form is important. As well, never really done flys before.

My shoulders suck. Just crossing my fingers that if I spend a significant time getting stronger at these weak exercises, it’ll make some difference. We’ll see. As I recall, the last time I did incline flys, I managed to tweak my left shoulder doing t-push-ups in the subsequent workout. As well, I did non-weighted pull-ups today. To ensure my shoulder joint recovers, I’ll skip my daily shit tomorrow as well.

Naptime. : )