Wednesday, February 4, 2009

(Blue) notes.

Monday afternoon I was sitting on the couch before jiu-jitsu. I found the St. Louis Blues were playing on t.v. I wanted to do nothing more than sit there, watch the hockey game, and eat myself silly. The last thing I wanted to do was go to class. I thought about the last time I deloaded.. um about 5-6 weeks ago.. time for a deload. So that means no sparring monday or wednesday night, thursday will be light 2x20 on some basic exercises.

Monday night, I went to class, but did lots of mobility work before class instead of rolling. We worked on a simple sweep to arm bar (basic stuff, but with lots of details). I skipped sparring and went home.

Last night, I went to the gym and decided that I would push weight on rows only, everything else would be kept light.
Front squats: as low as possible 2 second pause in the hole
5x4 at 135
Yes, these are pitiful. Yes, they're getting better. Yes, my hips still hate me.

Chins/dips:
3/5
3/5
3/5
2/5
1/5
no rest.. (big sign I need to deload)

bent rows:
worked up to 3 at 205
10 at 135

I went and did some rugby coaching. Ran around a little bit, worked on set pieces and talked about loose play. Fun stuff.

Mahalo.

2 comments:

Jesse said...

I feel your pain on the free squats, JB.

I've gotten to where I can do super light front squats with decent balance to a good depth sans hip pain.

Back squats are a wholly different beast. If I try to squat deepish (esp. sans box) my hips start screaming after the weight gets to about 150. It's frustrating because the hips joints are the limiter for me.

I'm thinking about adopting the Mike Boyle 12" box touch and go back squats for awhile. I think it might be helpful to keep the box "sit back" cue and depth gauge but get some of the feel of free squatting to a good depth to strengthen/limberize my hips.

Relatively speaking I have longish legs and a short torso and I committed mentally to squatting proper fairly late. Presently, the squat is very hard for me and I much prefer to pull. Though I try to keep at it.

Despite substantially improving my hip mobility, I still have a lot of issues with the exercise.

I've started working on the ankles more as it seems to be a hangup for me. Will let you know how that goes.

You still coming to the frozen north or you going to wait for the warm weather in June?

My defense is next Friday. After that, things should calm down a bit for me.

J.B. said...

The VoIP project that was going to take me to mad-town is on hold for 8-12 weeks.. so probably won't be until.. maybe june.

One thing that helps me is doing step-unders (check t-nation for eric cressey's article on "uses for the smith machine") you might want to try them.

Good luck with the defense!