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My Experience with LIfting Often

If you read my pieces on high-volume training (part 1 and part 2 ), you'll know that I've been toying around with a high-volume training block. Not so much doing a lot of work in each session, but doing a lot of workout sessions.

The schedule looked like this, more or less:

Monday - 2-board Press and Box Squat, 6 sets of 3 at ~70%

Tuesday - Incline Bench and Front Squat, 6-8 sets of 3 at ~75%

Wednesday - 2-board Press and Deadlift, 6 sets of 2 at ~80%

Thursday - Speed Bench and Speed Box Squats, 10-12 sets of 2-3 at ~55%

Friday - Max Effort Bench and Squat exercises, 4-7 singles heavy as hell

Saturday - 2-board Press and Front Squat, 6 sets of 2 at ~70%

That's the on-paper plan, anyway. In practice, I ended up missing about three of these sessions. The first week it wasn't a problem, but by Thursday of the second week, I was feeling beat up pretty good.

If you're familiar with my history, you know I've had on-going shoulder problems that prevent me from benching heavy. I can get away with board presses provided I keep up with my shoulder mobility and scapular movement work.

I had ART done on the shoulder back in May, which was just amazing. It felt better than it has in years. Well, this training cycle made it flare up. Not as bad, but it's been sensitive. Because of that, I've had to take extra steps. The movement prep work was done daily (which honestly should have been the case anyway, but I get lazy, what can I say?), and I've had to take care to do more warmup sets than I'm accustomed to. Once I get the area warmed up, it seems to cooperate.

I've been trying to do ghetto-ART on the area as well, just using my fingertips to dig around in there. That seems to help also, but I really need it to be properly tenderized again.

That's a problem I expected though. But it's not the only thing. The real slew of problems started around Thursday. I lost motivation to go to the gym. Sleep started getting disrupted -- I'd be really dead-tired, but couldn't fall asleep once I laid down. Older nagging problems started to crop up, mainly a recurring "pop" in my right hamstring and pain in the right knee (a combination of older injuries and ankle issues).

I'd been using tap-test software to see if it correlated to any fatigue. I was getting normal results on that as well -- until Thursday. On the one hand, I suppose it does work to indicate fatigue. On the other hand, I wonder if it's useful for anything but a tool in Captain Obvious' arsenal.

At any rate, I took all of this as a sign that overreaching had set in. This wasn't a shock. The entire point of the experiment was to see when, not if, the breakdown would come. Now I know. It took about 10 days of lifting just about every day. Even waving the work loads and the weights wasn't enough to counteract it. The good news is that I came in prepared, so it didn't screw me up.

So what's next? First priority is to get the injury flare-ups under control. That means a lot less pressing and a lot more upper back/scapular/thoracic/shoulder mobility work. It also means more single-leg work, partly to not have a bar on my back and partly to work on the hip issues. Might as well ramp up the ankle mobility work while I'm at it.

Second thing is to work the crap I didn't work this previous cycle. Again, lots of upper back work, lots of core (abs and low back) work, and what will probably be an emphasis on front squats. I'll post my thoughts on that shortly.

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