So you work out after your job in the evening? What food do you eat afterwards?

edit: i am not bruiser, i am sayid the saviour

Got my TK knee sleeves yesterday. The improved proprioception from the additional pressure is no joke; I tried some air squats with one sleeve on my bad knee and it actually felt better than my good one. I'm excited to try them tonight when I do 295x5x4.

The only problems I encounter with the knee sleeves is:

a) sweat
b) they kind of bunch up a bit behind the knee sometimes

Other than that... great. I wear them every time I squat.

5-3

Squat- 45x5x2, 135x5, 185x4, 225x3, 265x2, 285x1, 295x5x3
Bench- 45x10x2, 135x5, 155x3, 175x2, 190x5x5
Pendlay Row- 155x5, 175x5, 185x5x3
Deficit Deadlift- 265x6, 310x4, 354x2

Knee sleeves are niiiiiiice. My knees feel great. However, back wasn't feeling great so I kind of pussed out and only did 3 sets of squats. My volume days have been a little heavy anyways, so maybe I'll shoot for 5 sets at 295 next week. Bench was ok, bar speed was a bit slow on some reps, will microload from here.

How are the deficit DLs working?

Tough to say. I'm not doing much actual deadlifting right now so my max is definitely dropping. But I'm definitely getting stronger at the deficits, so hopefully when I go back to a higher volume of pulling, I won't be quite as weak off the floor. I haven't really done them yet, but speed pulls are also something that would probably be helpful to me, because I feel like it usually takes me a second of straining to generate enough force to break the bar from the floor. If I could get up to my maximum force faster it should leave more for the rest of the lift.

How do you do your deficit DLs? Do you just stack a plate on the floor and stand on it?

My gym has some aerobic step platforms that are 4 inches tall. They're definitely not built to support 500+ lbs though, so if I keep doing progressively heavier pulls I'll probably switch to stacking some plates.

5-4

Hanging leg raises holding a swiss ball- 10, 10, 10, 15

Bodyweight is 164. Also got some free calipers from a bodybuilding.com order. They are ridiculously hard to use, and my bodyfat estimates have ranged from 12 to 23%. 13% is probably about right. I'd like to get down to 10% which should happen at around 160 lbs. Hopefully I'll be squatting 330x5 by then. [/blog]

Those caliper things are useless imo. I use one of these, which has a reasonably consistent read each day:

I dont know if its the most accurate thing, but it is fairly consistent.

Cha,

How much does a good one of those scales cost? The one I got at Wal-mart was 35 bucks I think and the BF reading is terrible. Scale still works though.

I got DEXA done for a university study. It's the gold standard for BF%, but not sure where you could find it outside of that setting.

Here ya go

This is analyzing your after move from the 4-17 lesson

you can see the face on view the camera is at a poor angle, the down the line is in the right spot, but one thing about guys who teach all day from a computer is they get used to sitting down and looking at the screen. Had he gotten up and actually watched you hit balls from face on he'd know the ball position isn't that far forward but the angle is making it look that way.

As far as your golf swing, the plane/path looks pretty darn good, I also like a lot of your body motion, you have a bit of a weird move after the ball is long gone which I don't think is affecting anything. What I don't like is early on in the move the hands get a little overactive, the club face rolls open ever so slightly, and the wrists hinge too quickly. You can see at the top of the move there's just not a lot of extension and the arms/hands are quite low and possibly under (flat) the plane. This is probably costing you some clubhead speed.

If you look at the face on picture at halfway back with drive you'll see less than 90 degrees there between left arm and driver shaft. With the club being on a decent plane here the camera isn't playing any tricks on us so we know you've set the club a little too early. I see a decent amount of your chest from the behind the line view in this spot but I'd be interested to see your numbers at that point as you just have to be a little under rotated to get the club in that spot.

What I don't like about the lesson you took was all the focus on impact issues when there are clearly things to be ironed out in your backswing.

In summary, I'd work on removing some of the early hand/wrist action which should help the arms and hands get a bit more away from your body at the top of the swing. One drill I liked doing was taking a backswing, stopping there, then pushing my arms/hands as far away from my body as I could. Should feel a nice stretch and some tension. When I say away I mean straight back away from your right ear, not towards the golf ball. Hope that makes sense.

http://www.amazon.com/Omron-HBF-306C.../dp/B000FYZMYK

Amazon has several different ones. I dont remember exactly what I paid for mine or which exact model it is, but its in that ~$30 range.

Ty very much. I'll have to review this with the video up, but I think I know what you're talking about. I've had about 15 lessons so far, and in the first one we had my takeaway ironed our perfect. Since then we've pretty much stopped working on it, so it doesn't surprise me that I've let some old bad habits creep in.

5-5

Hang power clean- 88x4x2, 98x3x2, 110x3x2, 120x2x2, 132x1x2, 142x1x2, 152x1x2, 162x1, 172x1x2, 176x1x3
Pullups- 10 sets of 5
Bench- 45x25x3, 95x3, 135x2x6 (dynamic)
Reactive Box Jumps- 5 singles off an 18 inch box onth a 36 inch box
Reactive Drop- 5 singles off a 30 inch box
Cable Row- 15, 12, 10

Hang power cleans felt much better this time. I think I need to be a form nit from the start and take a lot of warmup sets if I want to do any heavy reps. Psyched to squat 315x5 on Saturday.

One more comment on this thing - its rigged against old guys. One of the things you have to enter is age. When I changed the age in it from 44 to 45 last year, my % went up by .5%. The other day when I changed it from 45 to 46, it went up .7%. For fun, I changed the age to 30 and it went down ~1.5%.

i know i've seen you do weighted planks before and this may be a super dumb question but how do you go about loading them on your back? i def need to start weighting mine but i can't really figure out how to effectively put any weight on my back lol.

i did em today. just ask whoever is next to you in gym.

Yeah you'll get some weird looks, but since a monkey could load plates on your back, it's better than doing it yourself.

5-7

Squat- 45x5x2, 135x5, 185x4, 225x3, 265x2, 300x1, 315x5
Close Grip Bench- 45x10x2, 135x5, 155x3, 170x2, 185x5x2, 185x8
Deadlift- 154x5, 242x3, 309x1, 353x1, 397x1, 427xf
Crunch Machine- 3 drop sets

Didn't feel great today so I was glad to make the squats with no issues. Lol the deadlift attempt was stupid, I"m just stubborn and don't want to be getting weaker at that lift. Broke it off the floor but that was it. Abs gonna be sore tomorrow.

Squat 315x5- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTVE5qfuXnQ
Bonus: Missed Snatch at 172#- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikR-sdzGFRY

Not needed imo, just take the plate, go down on your knees, bend forwards and ease it on your back. Works just fine.

Very solid squats. I'd consider looking straight ahead when coming out of the hole to mitigate the slight good morning.

why did you fail the snatch attempt? you got it all overhead and it looked good to me. nice job it is a lot of weight.

looks to me like he failed the snatch attempt because he couldn't lift it.

he lifted it plenty high.

He missed it out front.