August 21, 2015 – Week 12, Day 3

Dynamic Warm-ups

12” Log Clean and Presses
One Clean
90x5
90x5
120x3
120x3
150x3
150x3
180x1
210x1
235x1
Clean Every Rep
255x2
255x2
255x2

Close Grip Barbell Bench Presses
45x10
95x5
135x5
185x3
225x3
275x1
325x1
325x3
325x5

Standing Tate Presses
50’sx12
50’sx12
50’sx12
50’sx12

Straight Arm Pulldowns
60x3
90x1
120x12
120x12
120x12

35 Minutes of Stretching

Comments: Yet another session with the log. Increased the weight about but decreased the reps. Added another warm-up to get adjusted for the working sets and that one felt unreasonably heavy. Cleans felt good but the press from the shoulders is something else. If the weight feels heavy, I really just want to get it off my chest immediately and generally the first rep feels like that. I get better leg drive if I let it settle a bit. With the new “pop clean” I’ve been using, if I go right from there into the press, it becomes more of a strict/push press. Got to determine the trade-off as I know this won’t be optimal for heavier weights and it will use more upper body and less lower body. For the first set, I did that style and let the weight settle more on the following sets. I wasn’t sure if the speed was noticeable. It appears that the speed is actually better if I let the weight settle to allow for more lower body drive by about one second over two reps. The best rep was the first rep of the third set. I let the log go too far away from me on the dip of the second rep for that set so there was hesitation before I went for the lower body drive. At the pace I’m lifting, six reps appears to be what I could hit in a minute. I still got plenty of time to adjust before contest. Benching after that. Shoulders and triceps were feeling it from the log work. Sore but not out of it. Warming up felt fine though. One the working weight sets, the first rep felt off on every set and the issue wasn’t present on the subsequent reps. A big enough increase in weight that I wanted a spotter for anything above single to be on the safe side. On the last set, I setup to far down on the bench so that when I was fatigued, I started to ram the bar into the rack pins on the last two reps. Not that it really effected the number of reps, just the difficulty haha. I hit about what I expected from the past weeks’ example. Standing tates followed next. Increased the reps. Not as easy as two weeks ago but not as hard as three weeks ago. Fatigue built from set to set but not crazy madness style like it does on occasion with these higher reps. Sloppy straight arm pulldowns finished up the day. Better than the last time but still hard as balls. Only had to stop once on the last set to get all the reps. Good deal of stretching to finish the day and I got home before it was night this time haha.