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, herniations in all three regions of my spine, Bone spurs in places I didn't know you could get them, planter facetious, tendonitis 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.

Working backwards

On Tuesday of this week I trained chest and in that training session I started with decline hammer press and did four, five warm up sets of ten to fifteen reps. Then moved on to four heavy work sets of six, pyramiding up to the heaviest weight that I could for six repetitions.

Floor Presses were next where I did 6 sets of 10 reps with 185. The part of this that made it harder was only taking 30 second rests and never getting off the floor.

I moved on to flys with chains and did four work sets of ten to fifteen reps all sets to failure. After those sets I did a loaded stretch for a 45 second count using the same weight. With the loaded stretch, I lower the weight down in the same fly position as all the other sets. I did to where I just begin to feel a stretch in the pecs but not so much in the shoulders so it's not a full stretch, then I hold in that position for a 45 count.

I moved on to pec deck or the chest fly machine and did six sets of ten to fifteen repetitions. All of those with a slow tempo. At the end of that I did one set of four negatives or four ecentrics. On each one of the ecentrics I took 10 to 15 seconds to lower every repetition.

The last exercise of the day was one arm cable flys with the cable set at about chin level so I'm pulling across body. Basically a little bit higher than upper chest and did three sets of 15 to 20 there with all sets to failure.

Monday was 20 minutes of cardio and Wednesday a day off

Vacation Week

The week before I was on vacation, took a cruise to the Bahamas and got in a couple training sessions. Nothing really anything special to write home about, the weight room kind of sucked so I trained shoulders one day. They had two shoulder machines so I did ten sets for each machine. The other day I tried to train chest but the machine sucked so I couldn't get a feel for it. It was not comfortable so I did back and, once again, there was one machine that was worth a damn so I did ten sets there. That was pretty much about it.

I spent most of the week on a restoration. They had a spa recovery center that had a salt sauna, dry sauna, wet sauna, two different type of locals, cold showers and a cold tub so twice a day, probably every day that we were on the boat, I did a restoration session of ten to 15 minutes, time fasting between hot and cold. The way that I've always done the contrasting with restorative sessions like this is I always make sure that my cold is half the duration of whatever the hot was.

Depending on what means I'm using, I will go in the cold for half that. For example, a dry sauna. You can sit in a dry sauna a lot longer than you can sit in a wet sauna because the wet sauna you're breathing in moisture and you have moisture through your skin. In the dry sauna that's not there so you can sit in the dry sauna for an extremely long time if you wanted to. If I'm in a dry sauna for ten minutes then I'll go cold shower for five minutes. I'm in the wet sauna which is basically they have the steam at a really higher temperature, that typically I'll only stay in for five minutes, usually three to five minutes. I'll lay down and put a cold towel on my head. There's no need to have your blood pressure go up when you're contrasting any of this, and then contrast that with half duration of cold shower.

There's also the hot tub in the swimming pool which I would contrast back and forth. They had a salt sauna which I've never used before, which is around 78 to 80 degrees, so that one I contrasted with the hot tub. It was all in one area so it made it real easy to do.

My training log is far behind so going back into before I left...

I did not train the Sunday before because that was the day we departed. The Saturday before I trained back with John Meadows. It was a typical back workout for us. It wasn't super intense. It wasn't insane. It was four or five different exercises for two to three warm up sets and around three to four work sets per exercise. As I said, nothing insane just a regular, normal back day.

The night before that (Friday) I trained chest and that was with Casey Williams who was in town. Steve Goggins had his clinic, which was on Saturday, which went extremely well. It was really cool to listen to Steve because I picked up a few things that I forgot about and I actually picked up a few new things that I really want to touch base with Steve later to see how he implements some of these things into the program because some can be extremely beneficial to some of you guys that are  trying to peak for meets, especially how he cycles the deficit deadlifts which we'll get into at a later time.

 Anyhow, the chest session with Casey, he did a speed bench workout, I kind of talked him into training some of ... Training my mashed-up meat-head style which is using more muscle than momentum. One thing that I noticed, and there's a video of the training session which I will post with this training log so you can kind of see that, the take away for me with the training session was yeah, I had a good training session, I don't have very many bad ones anymore, I've trained for different reasons than I did when I was power lifting.

Casey, on the other hand, what I noticed with him is, since we were training more bodybuilding style with controlled tempo, which I think was driving him nuts the whole time, being a power lifter he wants to just heave shit up, I noticed after we got through about two, three exercises is that his chest was full of blood, just extremely pumped and his shoulders were extremely pumped. Without sounding like a huge Casey Williams nut swinger, his pecs are fucking huge and his shoulders are huge. Then when I was looking at that, his triceps, I'm not going to say that his arms are small but by comparison, for a power lifter a far as the way a typical power lifter would be built, his triceps are underdeveloped compared to his other body parts and it started to make sense to me, by watching this, why he has some log out problems that he does. He needs to find different exercises to bring his triceps up.

So we spent some time discussion what he had been doing for his triceps in the past and new things that he can do now for his triceps because whatever he was doing in the past isn't working. Either his pecs and shoulders are taking up too much of the load, which they already are on the bench press to begin with, or they're not targeting his triceps the way that they actually should. One of the exercises that we decided would work well for him are quarter dips, so we put that in there and then some different style of extensions.

This Friday Casey's going to be back in town again and I noticed something in his videos that he just sent recently with his leg drive that I want to kind of look and see as well to see if we can help iron out whatever issues that he's having with his leg drive. I have a feeling that, when you're dealing with the 535, 550 raw bench presser and you're finding these little, tiny nuances and these little errors, that if you can fix these little errors, it can put 50 pounds on their bench real fast. Some of it could be just not activating. Some of it can be that the shoulders and chest are just overpowering the triceps. There's a lot of difference scenarios that can be at play here.

At least now we're kind of finding a direction to be able to head, to be able to see if this is going to help bring the bench up, which I definitely think will. The tricep work I know will. Now it's just a matter of trying to dial in this technique work with this leg drive and see how that goes. We will be filming that, I believe, Friday and having something posted about that within the next week or so.

This cracked me up....