My training History: I trained less than one year before competing in my first powerlifting meet as a teenager back in 1983. Before leaving the sport partially due to injuries in 2005 I achieved my elitefts status in the 198,220,242,275 & 308 weight class. Throughout these years I did have a 3 year run in the bodybuilding world. I have degenerative joint disease, have had two shoulder surgeries (right shoulder now needs replaced), one full hip replacement, knee surgery, and herniation's in all three regions of my spine, Bone spurs (all joints). I can't even begin to list the number of muscle tears I have had, surgical and non surgical. I am "The Mashed Up Meathead" and this is my story.
You can find my training log archives HERE and my most current training log posts HERE.
My best lifts are behind be but my best training is yet to come.
* Unless otherwise noted the tempo of the work sets is about 1/2 of what most would consider normal. In most cases, if I did the set with normal temp what I fail at with 8-10 reps in training I could do for 20 reps with a normal tempo. This is to keep the joint stress down while increase the stress on the muscle. I have found this to work best for me provided the conditions listed in my training history above.
Wednesday, arm day.
I've mentioned this before in my blogs but I wanted to circle back and mention it again just so anybody who's following this knows where this falls into my training week. Every Wednesday morning at nine o'clock, I get muscle activation therapy done. I started this about six weeks ... I'm sorry, six months before my total hip replacement in an effort to try to combat and not have to have the total hip replacement. The person that I'm seeing for this is one of the physical therapists that helped me throughout my whole power lifting career and on a few occasions was a miracle worker to get me ready for a meet that I otherwise shouldn't have been able to compete in. He's highly skilled as a physical therapist, then he went into active release therapy, and then finally into muscle activation therapy.
The practitioner that he has working underneath him kind of followed the same career path. The person I'm seeing is somebody who is underneath the guy I used to and has gotten to know my body extremely well in the two years, almost three years now, that he's been working with me so we can kind of stay ahead of the game on a lot of issues. If I miss a week, there really isn't too much of a problem. If I miss two weeks, we can start to see, and I can start to feel things are starting to go a little astray.
This is a constant for Wednesday at nine o'clock in the morning. Because of this, unless it's absolutely 100% necessary and I have no other way going about it, I'm not going to train anything on Wednesday. It's going to fuck up what they spent an hour and a half trying to fix in the morning. My Wednesday training typically is going to be arms or shoulders, or it's just going to be completely taken off. It just depends how messed up I am and how many things got thrown out of whack that had to be put back.
It wasn't too bad going in this morning. Back was an issue, which typically is an issue when I miss a week and I did miss last week. The back is one area that we got to keep in check pretty often. My hip obviously, is another area of importance that has to stay in check. If we can really get ahead of the game, we can start getting some work done on my shoulder, which has been far and few because other things get screwed up.
This session I wanted to have some work done on the quad that I screwed up a couple of weeks ago, just to see the severity of it and what impact it's having on other muscle groups as far as balance and so forth. It was. It was having an impact on my back a little bit, but more importantly what we determined is the flexibility in that quad needs to be restored. It's lost some of its flexibility compared to the other leg and compared to what it had before. I need to back off the strengthening of it and replace it with the eccentric and isometric work, as well as some of the flexibility work as well.
With all that said, today was arms.
Extensions
Two warm up sets and then six work sets of 12 repetitions with each set taken to failure.
Seated dumbbell curls.
Two warm up sets, four work sets of 10-12, with each set taken to failure.
Tri-bell push downs super setted with fat rope face curls.
Three warm up sets and then six work sets of 10-12, all sets to failure. Next exercise, crossbody dumbbell extensions using a triple set. Two triple sets of repetitions ranging from 4-15, all sets taken to failure.
Preacher Curls
Two warm up sets and then five work sets of 10-12, all sets to failure. Next exercise, one arm, comfort handle push downs. This push down was standing to the side of the machine and pulling cross-body, instead of standing in front of the cable and pulling straight down. Two warm up sets and then four work sets of 10-12 to failure.