Recent Gym PR's

I promise I'll get to the how and why and all that good stuff soon. I have a busy night ahead of me with a friend's stag party and then off to the casino for another friend's birthday party. Debauchery is so exhausting.

I just wanted to get out of the way where my lifts are at currently. Here are some of my recent max lifts at the gym at a body weight around 190 over the past month. I'm 6' 2" with a short torso and long gorilla arms and stilts for legs. I also injured a muscle in my lower back January 20th. My physical therapist called it a muscle herniation, where the myofacial tissue tears and the muscle pops through. While it looked hideous, it wasn't incredibly painful, and it healed fairly quickly, but slowed my progress for a month or two. Here are the videos starting with most recent first:

March 22nd, 2012 - 295 lb Reverse Grip Bench Press:

When I can't chew solid food anymore, and you notice I look a little different, this will be why. Other than the risk of rearranging my face, reverse-gripping feels so much better on my shoulders. I definitely have more in me but my triceps and tendonitis where giving me some trouble. Incidentally all of my current problems like elbow and patella tendonitis are most certainly caused by my complete lack of any flexibility work. While becoming Gumby would be counter productive to my goals and hurt my strength, my current level of inflexibility is well beyond that line and needs immediate attention on my part.

March 20th, 2012 - 585 lb Deadlift From 18":

 The camera angle's horrible, but I'm pulling from the bottom pin on a power rack, a couple inches below my knees. With my height (6' 2") and long legs I feel the carry over to pulling from the floor is very good as long as the rack pull is from below my knees. It was an unfamiliar start position, and the bar didn't flex resting on pins the way it normally does with the plates on the ground, so it took me a couple tries to find my groove, but then the weight went up relatively easy.

March 16th, 2012 - 495 lb Zercher From Pins:

Hit a PR on Zercher Squats this day. It was oddly similar to my last relationship: hurt like hell and not quite as fulfilling as I thought it'd be. In all seriousness you do get a little more used to the pain of holding the bar like this with practice. I find the discomfort makes me pull harder and more aggressively. It's my go to lift when I'm pissed off and need to let it out on the iron. To me, this lift feels like a mix between a deficit deadlift and a front squat, and I find it a valuable exercise with good carry over to other similar more conventional lifts.

March 13th, 2012 - 545 lb Deadlift:

This was my 2nd time pulling since back injury January 20th. My lower back strength is slowly getting better. Body weight is in the low 190's here.

March 9th, 2012 - 495 lbs x2 Deadlift:

This was my first time deadlifting in almost two months after tearing the myofacial fiber in a lower back muscle. I was actually a little scared even though I felt fully recovered. I ended up not pushing it past 495 lbs, but it felt easy for a double and I definitely felt I could do more.

March 6th, 2012 - 495 lb Back Squat (a couple inches high): 

After failing with this weight 2 days before, I figured I'd give this 495 lb squat PR another try. Ended up doing it, and pretty easily, but very sloppy and a bit high. I've been trying to save my svelte narrow hips by squatting a little more narrow but my leverages work much better with a wider stance like this. This was pretty much the extent of my workout, with maybe 50 or 60 pullups throughout my squat warm ups and sets to stretch my back and get a little upper body work in. I'm weighing about 192 lbs here.

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February 17th. 2012 - Testing My Back With Squat Partials:
4 weeks after tearing the myofacial tissue in my lumbar lower back, my trusted chiropractor gave me the go ahead to start working up to some heavier weights again. He said "slowly start working up in weight and see how I feel;" I heard "do a quick warm up and see if I'm invisible again yet"...

My next post will be a little more detail about my history of training and where I started, and then I'll start going through the list of training and diet topics I have.