June 10, 2023 – Week 13, Day 4

Bulgarian Split Squats with Rotation
bwx5/5
17.5’sx15/15

Sandbag Tosses
30x1
35x1
40x1
45x1
40x1
45x1
40x1
50x1
40x1
50x1

Frame Carries
Titan Fitness (16”)
Casual Pace, Drop and Turns Halfway
115x100’
Makeshift (18”)
Normal, Reverse Start
276x50’
376x25’
476x25’
BiggDogg Strongg (20”, 1.5” handles)
568x25’
Normal
628x25’
Drop and Turns Halfway
700x100’ in 24.73 seconds
Hold
630x45.80 seconds
Normal, Reverse Start
568x25’

Atlas Stone to Shoulders
205x1
235x1
265x1
290x6

Atlas Stone Roll-ups to Shoulders
235x2+1
235x2+1

Stretching
 
Comments: This has been an odd week for sure. With the air pollution warnings. My Friday afternoon to late evening wasn’t great. With work, the higher ups (not sure who, but it feels like the one manager), is making the monthly unit meeting (which has been cancelled every month since March) to be in person going forward. So that will mean having to spend all day at the office for that day and not schedule any work to be done. I’ve never felt any meeting couldn’t have been an e-mail. It’s a bit aggravating as this being bundled as a training which I’m the only person that is compliant on it. I think my added frustration with that is that the first one is Tuesday after I get back from competing. Regionals had been a one day show when I requested leave (to guarantee based off seniority, I have to request all leave I want during the 2nd week of December of the previous year). Now granted, it does sound like the second day will move quickly (not sure I want that with the planned events though) so I should hopefully have enough time to recover. But having to plan for potentially an additional hour into my schedule for the morning commute is not something I want to contemplate right now. The other thing was dealing with a card issue. A purchase I made on Friday got flagged as suspicious and my card was locked. But I wasn’t made aware of it by my bank. It wasn’t until I got hungry after dinner and tried to order a pizza. 45 minutes on hold to maybe have gotten that resolved. I say maybe because it seems to be taking time for the different things to be affected. But it does seem the suspicious purchase (4 plantar fascia inserts and turmeric based supplement) went through this morning. I was ready to have to call first thing in the morning about it if still an issue displaying. Plan was to get out to train a bit on the earlier side to get back and take care of some things as plan was to go visit family Sunday. Turns out there were soft plans for this evening as well so that added some urgency as well. There was still construction. I was initially thinking it was due to the air quality issue the previous few days but then I remembered it was supposed to finish up 6/5/23. Turns out they announced they were doing more in the same area on 6/8/23 to be from 6/9/23 to 6/12/23. Ugh. So about an hour drive out there. So much for showing up earlier. It felt warmer than it should. Mobility stuff I’ve been doing for the knees and hips and hamstrings. Been feeling important to do with my knees and hips feeling stiff at this point. Start of workout was Bulgarian split squats with rotation of back leg. Single set instead of two this week. I felt comfortable enough to add some weight to these. Didn’t feel too bad. Sandbag work next. I’m starting to have some momentum on these the past two weeks now. This session was to be the lighter week. I did voice some concerns on recovery as far as having things still be heavier the next session. I do seem to be recovering well enough from tosses though. This was to work on singles and the post-activation potentiation effect. Essentially, take advantage of me going heavier on singles. To a toss, go up in weight and toss and then drop back down. Try to get the form the same and potentially have better tosses then with the heavier weights after coming back to them. I decided to not worry about the running out here and just focus on the swing. I was feeling good and then I did 40lbs and it just felt ok. Same with 45lbs (got good height but poor distance). I was thinking, great, going to be one of those days. 40lbs felt about the same but then the second toss with the 45lbs was perfect. Ok, halfway but now alternating the 40lbs and the 50lbs. First pairing was meh but the last one was again like with the 45lbs. It might have been my best toss with 50lbs. Like 16’ might not be a pipe dream to aim for with this at Nationals. After I was done, someone else ended up doing bag toss and the missing 5lbs showed up. I’m not 100% certain but what might have been the case is that the 40lbs sandbag was 45lbs last week and this week. I can’t confirm this so I’m leaving the numbers as I’ve put. If this was the case, definitely is good news for potential here. Time for frame work. I was sweating a good bit by this point really. Like, a bit too much. Being out in the sun can really sap you. So this was a little up to me as far as how I went with things. Warm up the same as I have been doing but for the working weight I was to either do a contest run or to do two 50’ runs but start facing the other way so that I had to incorporate the turn around and go aspect. I was initially leaning towards the later as I knew that my lower body was feeling fatigue. I was to use 95-102.5% of contest. I decided to do the contest run and see if I could beat my time with 700lbs. But I would work up with doing the facing away starts to practice that. Low effort, high yield. I’ll need to remember this for next time I end up doing a drop and turn event as part or working up. Put the hand towels on the handles once I got outside with the big frame. Knees were doing fine so that was good. I was a little concerned with the last warm up because there was a woman outside the one place out there feeding her baby and I had to make sure she was aware I’d be making a loud noise and if she wanted me to wait and she said she was fine. With the top set, I think the entire time I was thinking “crap, I’m too slow”. I just couldn’t feel like I could get my legs to go faster and that I was slowing down on the second leg. I didn’t feel like the terrain was affecting me like last time. Just my legs and hips were toast. I was thinking I was like 30 seconds here so I was quite shocked to see that it was under 25 seconds and beat my previous time by just over half a second. So I hit a training goal here. Wasn’t quite done with frame. I was to do some more grip work and the frame being out was kind of the easiest thing. I mean, I guess I could do some rolling bar hangs or d-handles. But plan was to do a challenging hold of 45-60 seconds. I tend to have a good shot for one set and then weight has to be dropped for repeat efforts. Learning that from these past two grip hold sessions and that may be the way going forward to get the work in. So dropped the weight 10% from the carry and just held on. This was even tougher than I thought it was going to be. Got a little over 45 seconds (I did have a few seconds left). Hands were sore after all this with the frame. Last thing for the session was stone work. Stone setup was a bit better and it seems like this is going to be the setup now. I guess no longer having the highest platforms. Besides the shortest, the other two are like a half inch shorter now. Just minor things that annoy me (the gremlins of inconvenience). But I wasn’t going to be in danger of smashing any more fingers getting things in a good spot to do stone to shoulder. I was tempted to stone of steel but figured that would actually take a lot longer to get warmed up and ready compared to stones. I was to warm up in singles to 90-100% contest and do a set of 60-75 seconds but not stop at time but at a made rep. Goal being 5-6 reps. I think what this was to be was to do reps and then finish a rep if time is going if close. Maybe. I was debating between doing 265lbs and 290lbs. But 265lbs was under 90%. Even if I was feeling beat. I decided to go with 290lbs. I focused on the reps part of it. I got the first two reps pretty quick but I could tell the stabilizing was taking a bit out of me so there was more rest after that. Just go until I got five reps. Fourth one was rough and I took a moment to ensure I could do a fifth rep. That breather was enough and it ended up being the easiest and best rep of the session. So of course I felt I couldn’t end on that and went for a sixth. As I was about to go, I saw a centipede crawl onto the platform and it accelerated toward me as I went to pick up the stone. Going to have to ignore that. It was an ugly rep (I wouldn’t have given it to me in a contest with not holding it long enough) and no clue if the centipede lived or not. Effort ended up being like 2 minutes and 15 seconds as opposed to 1 minute and 15 seconds. Last thing was stone roll ups but not quite. Adding a little twist to them having me do 2 roll ups and then on the third rep shoulder it. Bring weight down to 15-20% of what I did. I was fine with 235lbs. I was expecting things to be a little tough here especially how much harder 265lbs had felt just doing roll ups last time. But these were really easy. Put stuff away and stretched out before heading home. Drive home was much smoother. Plan being to ice knees twice before bed since I had family things later as well as the next day.