After spending a week in Tennessee riding the Tail of the Dragon and a ton of other great rides in the Smoky Mountains, I was back to the grind the following week with great workouts. Anytime I take a week off, my joints feel like I am 24 again. I have laughed and said that maybe I should just train every other week and I would feel like a million bucks all the time. Wait, why is that so funny? Anyway, I digress ...
The week off was not your typical week off. Basically I ate whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted and that usually was only once or twice a day. When I ride I don't like to have to shit and piss all the time so it was a nice break from, well, shitting and pissing all of the time. I basically came back home lighter but fatter. Yeah, getting old is a bitch. After eating and hydrating for 5 hours, I was filling out nicely and was ready to start training for the week.
One big thing I changed this week was training abs at the beginning of my leg session. My logic was that it would help to warm up my mid-section and help to stretch out my lower back and it did exactly that. I fancy myself pretty bright but why it took me so long to figure this one out is beyond me. I think I just assumed that training abs first would somehow make my core weak and that isn't a good idea before legs. I had no problem with stability and my back felt great. I will obviously be continuing this.
Going back to the 3 day a week split has been great in that it allows me to not overtrain my chest and back but to also go back to using some exercises that I felt I had to discontinue while training chest and back so frequently. Some examples of exercises that I felt I had to dump with the old split were:
dips for triceps (hitting my chest even indirectly would not allow for enough recovery)
undergrip latt pulls to the chin for biceps (hitting back directly was not allowing for full recovery)
rear laterals for rear delts (too much rear delt work with all of the back work)
Having these exercises back in are providing the added benefit of more variety and an added angle to working that muscle.
The other thing that I learned not only this last week but the last 4 or 5 weeks is that my stretching protocol is likely much more of a necessity than even my chiropractic adjustments because I haven't been able to make an adjustment for almost 5 weeks and due to consistently using my stretching protocol, my back feels just as good as it always has. If I get adjusted regularly but skip stretching, this is not the case. Obviously, I will continue my adjustments but it is good to know the importance of my stretching protocol and what it means to my back health.
I have made the decision to pull the plug on competing, as most of you reading this will already have heard. There are a myriad of reasons with most being based around my health and my motivations, responsibilities, etc., but there are still others that aren't involved with bodybuilding, at all, that I will explain in detail in an article for EliteFTS. I will be finishing up that article in about a day and then proof it for another day and submit it. I anticipate that it will run relatively quickly so that the information is timely as I have had a lot of people contact me with their concerns about my health and well-being. I am fine but the signs were obvious and I would be a fool to continue on the path that I was. Basically, what you can get away doing to your body in your 20s and 30s you cannot continue to do into your 40s without starting to see signs that the body is not as resilient and forgiving as it once was. I have too much going for me outside of bodybuilding to continue to take the risks that are showing to me right now. It isn't just the health issues, though, and I will go into everything in the article.