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 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. Loved the training didn't like the competing aspect so I went back to my first love, powerlifting. Injuries have been a part of my life ever since I can remember and were the biggest reason for leaving the sport (I can no longer hold a squat bar on my back). I have  degenerative joint disease, have had two shoulder surgeries (right shoulder now needs replaced), one full hip replacement, knee surgery, herniation's in all three regions of my spine, Bone spurs in places I didn't know you could get them, planter facetious, tendinitis and bursitis. 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.

Dialing In - Bench Press

Tonight we had Casey Williams and Yessica Martinez in the gym as I noted in previous training log posts, Matt Smith and I were looking forward to working  with Casey a little bit to dial in his Bench Press and to figure out what was going on with his leg drives and after 35, 40 minutes we finally figured out what the problem is so we hopefully should start to see his bench taking off because of this. I don't want to get into what we actually found out, because we did film the whole thing from start to finish on our thought process and what we would have him do and how we kind of figured out and diagnosed what we think the problem is.

It's always guess work but we're pretty confident based upon what we saw with his technique, speed and strength on the changes that we made. It ended up being one very simple change. Once we were done with that, I moved onto shoulders.

Shoulders & Triceps

For my shoulder training, I started with seated shoulder presses using the plate loaded shoulder press machine. The way I do these is I start with a quarter per side and I do many warm ups sets, usually in the neighborhood of six to seven warm up sets of eight to ten repetitions. Just trying to loosen the shoulders up a little bit.

I cannot do a full range of motion on this exercise because of my shoulders, so I can get almost all the way down so that my hands are pretty much at my upper chest level. Then I can get three quarters of the way up. When I get to the top, I'll hold it for a second and then lower with a controlled tempo. On this one my tempo's probably half the speed of what you would typically see with a normal training tempo from anybody else at the gym. Then I'll start working out a quarter per side, doing sets of eight repetitions. These would be the work sets.

I still keep the tempo controlled, I still pause and I don't heave in any way with any of the repetitions just to keep more tension on the muscle and to kind of keep the weight lighter so I don't damage the joint any worse. I worked up to five quarters per side and did two sets of eight there.

After that, I moved on to standing side raise swings. These are not full side raises. They're just partial swings. This is an exercise that I picked up from John Meadows. I used to go a lot heavier on these, but I get a lot better feel and my shoulders feel a lot better sticking with weights that are between 30 and 50 pounds.

I did one warm up set, 20 reps with 30 pounds and then did four sets of 40 reps with 40 pound dumbbells. Tempo is, it's not controlled. It's just swinging the weights, not heaving but just kind of swinging like a pendulum, in and out with a very short range of motion, maybe a one eighth range of motion of a normal side raise.

I moved on to using a muscle mace for tricep push downs. I used the bottom grenade balls and did warm up sets starting with three or four plates on the stack, all the way to doing two sets of eight with the entire stack.

After those two sets of eight, I break it down to about three quarters of a stack and I will do 15 reps with each set of grenade balls on the mace. There's three different sets, so a total of 45 repetitions. I did that for two sets.

Next up, standing tricep extensions using a rope with the cable set at ear level, one arm at a time. I grab the handle, let it pull and stretch my tricep back so my pinkie is basically going behind my ear. I will let my elbow rise a little bit to get a little bit more tricep stretch and then bring the elbow down some and then extend out.

With this one I really didn't need any warm up sets. I know what weight needs to be used and I do use a very slow controlled tempo. Four sets of 12 to 15 on this is what I did. Every set was taken to failure.

The last exercise of the night was seated tricep push downs. It's a seated dip machine or the seated tricep push down machine, whichever you want to call it. I really like this machine because I can do a very controlled eccentric and normal concentric. I'll push down with a normal pace, then I'll lower back up, or I'll bring it back up, which is the eccentric on that machine with a 10 pound.

On this I did maybe three or four warm up sets just to kind of determine what weight I was going to be able to use. I wanted to fail between 10 and 12 repetitions. Once I found what that weight was, I did four work sets of 10 to 12 repetitions to failure. After that, I put four, five, six more plates on and did one set of four and only did the eccentric or the negative part of the motion. I lower, took 10 seconds to lower each repetition. The way I did this was, I started in a standing position, I slide down into the seated position, I lower it using the eccentric contraction of the triceps, come back up to the standing position, use my body weight to get back down to the seated position and repeat. That was for four repetitions.

Lastly, I went back over to the power rack and there's a barbell placed in the rack and just grabbed the barbell and fell into a tricep extension position for a loaded stretch and held the loaded stretch for a 45 count and then called it a day.