I headed to London to the s5 compound on Sunday to squat and hit some speed pulls. I haven't squatted on a straight bar in at least 9 weeks and I could certainly tell. I had a lot of trouble getting a good setup and unrack but I slowly figured it out. I'm currently preparing for the 21 deadlift salute at the Arnold Classic, so, for my squat days I've been rotating safety squats and squat mornings to build up my back.
We box squatted, which I'm not very good at anyways so I put briefs on in an effort to keep up with Ted Toalston as long as I could
Box Squat ( 60 lb bar, but mathed as 45lbs) barx5 135x5 225x4 315x3 405x2 495x1 545x1 585x1
The last one wasn't that tough but since I'm getting ready for a Deadlift only meet and wasn't doing very well setting up I called it quits there. Ted worked up to, I believe 730 raw for a pretty easy single.
Speed Deadlifts on the new platform.
We decided to test out the new platform with all the band peg attachments. I will admit, before I used it I thought it was probably unnecessary to have 7 band pegs per side. But you can really target a specific weak point that way and I was actually really impressed by the platform.
We only had 135 on the bar and pulled a single with one band per side , 2 per side... all the way up to 7 per side then we pulled a single with 2 bands per peg per side, working up to 14 bands. the last few were really, really tough at lockout. But you could generate enough speed off the floor you could really tell the difference at lockout.
A few adjustments are being made as we speak - I can't wait to give the new and improved version a try!
