Fri, 16 Dec 16
My training partner Mike Collela was back in town today for his graduation from Salisbury after finishing up his internship with UMBC S&C. Santa Clause brought him an early Christmas present of a Metal Jack DL suit so we went to Iron Strong CrossFit to break it in. I brought my Jack suit as well since I hadn't tugged on a straight bar with it since back in May when I was training for USS nats. This was Mike's maiden voyage tugging in a suit and he learned the joys of trying to squeeze 220 lbs of excrement into a sack that was only meant to hold 50 lbs. It took several sessions of pulling and wiggling and squeezing and stretching plus a few warmup sets to get it fully seated around his hips. Once that was taken care of, the suit did what it always tries to do - push you into the worst possible starting position to pick things up and accentuate any mobility or strength deficits to try and kill the wearer. We worked up setting up and starting a few different ways and I told him what Matt Rhodes told me a long time ago that finally made it all click: You have to do what the suit doesn't want you to do. Put another way, you have to fight against the ways the suit it trying to make you move to get into a good setup and starting position and be able to make the suit work for you. It was pretty ugly at times, but Mike did hit a few pretty solid singles where he was able to get out of awful starting position the suit was pushing him into and he could feel the difference that correctly using a suit can make. I worked up on some tugging myself while all this was going on and was pretty happy with my results.
Deadlift
10x45
5x135
5x225
3x315
2x1x315 - Added Metal Jack DL suit, suit wasn't fully seated for first set so I adjusted and did another, better one before moving up.
1x405
1x495
1x585 - Added belt.
1x650 - This was really fast and easy, especially considering I haven't pulled heavyish in my suit in about 6 months with the exception of my one rep on the car DL at Maryland's Strongest Man back in November. I felt good for at least 700 based on this pull, but as I had just finished up with finals and I haven't trained heavy suited tugs in a long time, I stopped here for today, but I'll definitely work up again sometime soon once I get my training schedule set for Winter semester.