Squatting, Changes & Whatnot

Today, squatting was awesome. I didn't sleep great last night, and I had a shitty breakfast this morning. But I pumped myself full of coffee and headed to the gym. Warm up went nice, though it was pretty short... my first weight for squats was 190, so I basically hit 95 for 5, 135 for 5, then got to work. I felt pretty good - my form was a little choppy from taking time off, but that was counteracted by my intense elation from a combination of the return to training and the black coffee pulsing through my veins. Hit 190, then 225 for 5, then put 250 on the bar.

Pretend 250 looks like this. 

A few reps were a little sloppy (again, rusty form), but even so I managed to get 12 reps. I'm pretty happy with that - first of all, it was my first day back, and secondly last month I only got 10 at 255, so 12 at 250 is pretty nice. It was a hard 12, but still felt great.

Next up were speed deads, which I did from a deep deficit - off a 45 lb bumper, so about 4 inches (I'll talk about why at the end). These moved nicely, it was a little weird to feel out the deeper deficit, but I got the hang of it pretty quick, and I think they will feel even better next week.

Then, did 5 x 10 squats, this time at 175. I can hardly believe they are this heavy now, but they are still moving really nicely. My pain tolerance is a little low cause of the rest, but even so the pain wasn't TERRIBLE, and I managed 12 reps on the final set. I need to keep pushing these, however, because they are gonna get exponentially harder at 185 and 195. The goal is to make it to 205 for a 5 x 10 at the end of the summer. It would be incredible if I could manage that. If I am able to continue to progress to that point, then I will probably switch it to a 5 x 8, in order to keep the volume very high while still pushing the weight up.

PLATZ

Finally, did some sets of ghd situps with weight. Nothing special. I'm gonna keep working on ways to work my core at Crossfit, I'm sad my cable crunches are gone for a few months.

SO, amazing first day back. really happy with my performance today, and looking forward to many many workouts to come.

SLIGHT TWEAKS TO STUFF - firstly, I decided I'm not going to weigh myself until the end of these  4 cycles. I'm going to instead focus on appearance and performance - If I look good and my numbers are going up, then that's enough for now. I'll try and make some serious strength gains while improving my leanness and size, see how I feel about both at the end of this cycle, and THEN weigh myself and get an idea of where I want to go from there. Secondly, I'm going to cut out dumbell shoulder presses on tuesdays, and instead just do regular barbell overhead pressing, with light weight for sets to failure. Just cause I want to and I think it might be more useful to me, and Crossfit doesn't have a great set of dumbells. Thirdly, I'm going to wave the deficits for my speed deads - the first three weeks will be from the floor, the second three weeks from a 25 lb bumper (about 2.5 inches) and the third three weeks, from a 45 (about 4 inches). I think that this will help even out my deadlift progress over the three cycles, rather than having the first cycle be too hard, me make a bunch of progress in the second, and then the third be too easy.

So that's all for this day. I'm excited AND nervous for tomorrow - I haven't benched in a while, and I have to adjust to different equipment. But hopefully I'll still fuck shit up like I did today.

I LOVE SQUATTING.