3 hour Pain-fest

Seeing as how I had very little else to do today, and that it is hot as FUCK and I would just be sweating my balls of no matter where I was, I decided to take my time in the gym today, Have some fun, and work my ass off. Ended up being there for just about 3 hours, which is hilarious. It was a strong day though. Lots of hard work and some heavy weight moved.

Typed in "heavy triple bench" and a bunch of pictures of triple H came up. Whatever, he's huge, he gets respect. 

First was Chaos and Pain benching. Didn't rush the warmups, but I hit 95 for a few sets, then 135, 165, and finally racked up 185. Again, I'm not timing these anymore, just trying to move through them quickly, and I did well. I lost track of how many sets I did, so I erred on the cautious side, doing 1 more set than I thought I needed to, so I'm PRETTY sure I got ten sets of 3, but even if it was 9 x 3 that's still pretty awesome progress from just a few months ago - hitting 185 for just ONE set of three was a rare occasion up until about march, so getting it for 9 or 10 sets without too much trouble is really cool.

Next up was overhead pressing. Again, I dropped the weight back on this, taking my 5/3/1 percentages back about 3 months, and I'm VERY glad I did. Continuing to try and get those fucking heavy reps would have been totally about ego, and wouldn't have made me any better. Dropping the weight feels awesome, and I'm getting new rep PR's, and this will DEFINITELY make me a lot stronger than trying to struggle with weights I can't handle. Anyways, pressed 95 for 5, 110 for 5, then 125 for a set of 10, which is a 2 rep PR (I'm fairly sure). Considering this was AFTER all those triples at 185, that's pretty fucking awesome. After this, I dropped back to 110 and 95 and pressed those weights from a dead stop to failure, a shitload of times. My press is going to get SO strong.

Next were rows. I did these with a little higher back angle today, probably closer to 45 degrees than my normal 75 or so. Went a little heavier today, working up in sets of 10 to 155 and hitting that for three sets. These felt pretty good, I definitely was using the right muscles and got a little bit of a pump. Need to keep playing with different for and variations though.

Next were pushups. Last week I did 3 sets to failure, which wasn't really that fun so I decided to mix things up a little. I tried doing sets of 10 every 30 seconds, the goal being to keep that up for a full 5 minutes, getting in a hundred reps. I made it through set 5 without much problem, and then got set 6 with a LOT of struggle. This was good, it was a fun way to do these and I got a nice pump. I'm probably going to do the same format next week and try and get another round, keep working at it till I can get all 10. It's a fun little WOD-type addition to my fridays.

Finally, I didn't feel like doing any of my normal pulling to finish off the day, so I decided to take a leaf out of Jaime's book and do some heavy shrugs. I've never really done this, so at first I started slow doing 135, 185, and 225, but they just felt stupid. So, I went up to 315 and did it for 3 sets of 10. It's a weird movement to get used to, and I didn't feel like I was working anything particularly hard DURING the lift, but after I started getting a nice little pump in my traps. I actually really liked these, they feel kind of stupid but it's nice to hold some heavy ass weight at the end of a workout. Hopefully I'll be nice and sore in my trap-back tomorrow. I think I'll keep playing with these.

Thanks for the advice Jaimie, you absurd man. 

Anyways, very solid day. Lots of hard work. Tomorrow, some heavy squats and a little bit of strongman. Hasta la vista, baby.