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.
Sunday - Chest
Flat chain presses using a tsunami grip, handles and double chains.
By double chains what I mean by that is the carabiner is attached in the center of the chain. It's then attached to the tsunami grip handle instead of the chains being attached at one end and dangling all the way down to the floor. The reason for this is with a double fold chain for a regular flat press, you still get the same deload at the bottom with an increased load at the top. The reason why I don't use this same set-up for incline flies or flies is because the range of motion is greater. When the range of motion is greater and you have a double chain set-up, the chains come off the floor. That's become a stability issue. With a flat press the chains stay on the floor the whole time unless you have really long arms. Then you want to use an extra carabiner to lower the chains closer to the floor which would just be hooked onto the tsunami grips.
In that case there would be the tsunami grip, one carabiner and another carabiner hooked to that one then the chains hooked to that. Two warm sets with one chain per side then progressively worked up doing sets of eight repetitions until getting to a weight that eight repetitions wasn't possible to perform. That weight was seven chain per side.
Close grip shoulder saver presses.
* With this, I went back to using the shoulder saver bar. The reason for that, to be honest, is that bar is usually always in the rack where this is set up. It's easier just to grab what's there than to grab a different bar and set the shoulder saver pad on it. Essentially it's the same thing, the only difference is the shoulder saver bar weighs more than what a regular bar would weigh. With this exercise two warm up sets of ten with a quarter per side. Two sets of ten with a plate per side. Two sets of eight with a plate and a quarter per side, one set of six with two plates per side. One set of six with two plates in a dime per side.
Slight incline chain presses.
For this all we did was to take a bumper plate, not one of them gigantic ten inch wide bumper plates, but fifty five pound Eleiko bumper plate. Slid it under one end of the bench but then using a slight decline, did chain presses the same way then we did the chain presses flat. This time it was working up to five chain per side and then doing four work sets of eight reps with that weight.
Seated machine flies.
Two warm up sets of ten, that was done to determine how much weight I was going to be able to use. The goal was to do four sets to failure between ten and fifteen repetitions. I actually did six sets between twelve and fifteen.
That was it.