‘Were Kind of All Over the Place’

That admission (above) is the kind of thing that’ll get you in trouble, subject to long, doubtful looks by those presumably in the know.  No, you should NOT be all over the place in terms of your training program, changing exercises or rep schemes, goes the conventional wisdom.  You should stick to the plan.  Hang tough.  Be committed, because nothing is ever accomplished by people who give up easily.

This is hammered particularly hard by the on-line strength and fitness experts who rely on a two-part business transaction:

1.  You have to buy their program, and

2.  you have to stick with it, the better to continue this financial relationship.

The pressure not to stray - with your attention or your money - gets extreme, to the point of ridicule.

Yes, people who don’t understand the mathematics of systemic, incremental progress should not veer off into wrong-headed rep schemes or exercise choices, or they should not fear progress and the prospect of heavier weights.  However, for those of us who’ve been around the block, what if we’re on to something?  What if we understand full well the mathematics of progress grinding to a halt and even heading in the wrong direction?

That would call for a program that allows for variety instead of a pledge of fealty.  The best example of this is Westside Barbell’s Conjugate Method, which advocates complete changes in primary strength exercises every three weeks, which is astonishing, fast enough to make one wonder what they know that the rest of us do not.  (I’ll get back to that.)

The theme this week is Changing the Range of Motion in Key Exercises, which is the antidote to sticking with a routine despite increasing misery and decreasing numbers.  That stubbornness comes from the belief - or hope - that you’re on the verge of a breakthrough.  It never comes.

My experience with older lifters, which is myself and a partner a few years older, is that there’s a greater specificity to muscle training the older you get.  By contrast, a college aged lifter who embarks on a good, hard bench press program tends to beef up his entire chest and shoulder complex.  As he works the prime bench press movers, the surrounding muscles are also developed, despite their limited contribution.  A lifter in his 60’s trains solely the fibers that are doing the benching.  They’ll be wiry if not beefy, but the surrounding muscles will appear as though nothing is happening.

This is probably neurological, though I’m not sure whether it’s a sign of greater or lesser efficiency.

This means that an older lifter has to be mindful about training muscles he used to take for granted.

Older liters are now facing double jeopardy:

1.  Those few fibers being twisted into rawhide can an only progress in strength for so long, while

2.  Neighboring fibers in the same pec, shoulder, or leg remain neglected.

This is why we’re kind of all over the place,

- substituting dumbbell work for barbell bench presses,

- doing rack pulls and halting deadlifts instead of full or Romanian deads

- doing belt instead of barbell squats.

I write all this mainly to remind myself that these kinds of changes have to happen probably every month or so, especially at the first sign of a slowdown.  We should know by now that those trends never improve.

Dumbbell work on the bench creates greater pectoral stimulation because it increases the range of motion around the shoulder joint.  You learn pretty quickly that you should not stray with your dumbbell path too far from directly over the shoulder.  When the weights are at shoulder level, this means your hands are close to your body, and your elbows drop far more deeply behind you than they would if you were holding a bar with your arms apart.

Deadlifts simply beat you up over time, so it’s good to de-load and study the movement.  In my case, I use the rack pulls to remind myself to drive downward with my legs and forward with my hips.  In the halting deadlifts, which are off the floor and to just over the knees, I work on levitating, which is rising as a unit with a heavy weight.  My hips, shoulders, and the bar all rise together as I extend my legs, maintaining their relative positions.

I had two problems in the squat: the shoulder injury, which would not let me hold the bar on my back comfortably, and my quads getting comparatively weak.  This goes right in the category of neighboring muscles going neglected.  I could squat a ton, primarily with my hamstrings, but I was discovering that it was getting harder to get off the floor.

If I were looking for something under the couch or cracking my back on a foam roller, and I had to get up, I’d usually make my way to kneeling with one leg up, essentially in a lunge - but I couldn’t extend either leg well enough to get all the way up easily.  This made me feel old.

Belt squats give the shoulder a rest, and doing them with my heels raised on a two-by-four places an emphasis on my quads, which are now back in business.  I can get off the ground llckety-split, and I’m skating faster in hockey.

The way we know these changes are good is that we’re progressing.  We’re improving in reps and moving to heavier dumbbells, and piling more weight on the belt squat rig and the deadlift bars.

Granted, we started conservatively with our weights, to alleviate the sense of heavy abuse, but also to create a bit of a running start and allow for progress.  When these exercises slow down, we’ll switch to others.

We’ll probably go for six weeks instead of three, which is Westside’s policy.  I have one insight on that: they’re operating so heavily with their max weights that three weeks of progress is all they can muster.

My experience is with doing quarter squats, which are squats off pins at nipple height and essentially one-quarter of the full range of motion.  You can do very, very heavy weights, provided you work up to them.  The last time I did, I hit triples with 700 pounds.  That was my max level - and it’s true: after three weeks of that, I was done.  I probably did them for six weeks, but that included a few conservative weeks of working through the 500’s and 600’s to that level.  At the top of the heap, however, you can’t continue.

That’s the difference between Westside guys and the rest of us: Westside has them staying right at the edges of their performance envelopes, so three weeks is all they have before an exercise will regress.  We might take a bit longer to reach those thresholds, but the same principal holds true.