MEET REFLECTION
HAHA no but seriously folks Part 1 is a little run down of assessing each lift based on the training cycle. This is the most running I've done in a long time.
Click here so you can know what tf this log is referring to.
Squat
Dave was pleased with how the squat cycle went so we will replicate something along those lines again. We will add in some box work to help with my speed and form out of the hole as well as low back work like heavy triples on good mornings to build up what I lost during the great back debacle of ’18. We did some heavy good mornings this time around but played them more on the safe side because of my low back.
The biggest issue at that meet though was my pick on the third attempt. The pick was an issue earlier in training but we did a few weeks of heavy reverse bands and fixed the issue. So going into the meet it was not a problem. It was just an issue on that attempt. The second I got wedged under the bar, I knew my feet weren’t in the right place. But I was so fucking livid and I KNEW that no matter what, I was going to get the squat. So I just did it. At first I thought I should have racked it and got re-set but Dave later pointed out that perhaps if I made the decision to re-rack, I would have lost that momentum and potentially had the same or worse of a squat just due to the timing. So I guess I made the correct split second decision based on where I was at the time.
Bench
We are going back to the drawing board for this bench cycle. Obviously based on my lackluster performance, we need to retool things a bit. The only positive parts were that I 1) got stronger (but it didn’t transfer over in the meet so it doesn’t fucking matter) 2) it took longer for my elbow pain to kick in.
My weight went up a little towards the end of the meet cycle but it went up enough to where it changed how my shirt fit for the meet. As a result, the way we had been setting it during training actually hindered my benching at the meet. We now know that at a similar body weight, we shouldn’t fold the arms down for anything under low-mid 300s. So this time around I need to be more cognizant of not letting my body weight fluctuate like that before the meet.
Deadlift
There was not really a deadlift cycle this time around because of my back. I didn’t deadlift for a while then I took some heavy pulls towards the end. So there isn’t much to write about how it went since it was just based around what would work with my back. Obvi based on my lack of lockout I need to work on hip and glute strength but other than that, we may try out some new deadlifting programming ideas this cycle around.
At first I was incredibly disappointed in the amount of technical errors that I managed to imbue my lifting with. In the course of my conversation with Dave the week after the meet, he said it like this: technical or programming issues are easy to fix. Getting stronger is the hard part. It's easier to program fixes if you can identify an issue as opposed to having to just get stronger.
It would have been nice to not fuck up my squat and seen what a clean 500 looked like but it wasn’t a true grind because of overall strength (except maybe my low back). So every meet issue, we know the root of and will come up with a plan to unfuck.