Some weeks you move the weights, other weeks the weights move you…

This was a very odd week for me, I have signs I use that tell me when its time to take a step back and rest a little. Not so much a full fledged deload, but more along the lines of an auto-regulation in my program. Sometimes I only need to do this for one day and I’m fine, sometimes its a week. Usually the signs I’m looking for are (in no particular order):

• Strength drops off
• Resting hart rate increases
• Joints (particularly elbows) start to ache
• I lose the desire to workout
• I have to drag myself through workouts and move slow
• I’m tired and hungry all of the time

Oddly, I have a couple of these as my strength has dipped a bit and my elbows are aching, but other than that I feel fine. I’m not hungry, I have plenty of energy and the rest of the boxes are checking off just fine. It seems as if I’m creeping up on needing a deload but aren’t quite there yet. I have to travel in a couple weeks and will miss two sessions because of it. I’m hoping that I can make it until then without having to back off. I should be able to do it, I’ll just have to be better about managing recovery outside of the gym.

Thursday and Saturday are my max effort days for upper and lower. Thursday I worked the mid grip on an EliteFTS American Camber Bar (found here https://www.elitefts.com/american-cambered-grip-bar.html) which should result in a max from 305 to 315. I got 285 which is low for me. Saturday was low bar squat with orange bands, I should be around 405 bar weight (another 100 or so in bands) yet only got to around 375. Bad week for maxes…

On the high side, and this probably has a lot to do with my maxes being down, I finished my cut weighing in at 184.4 on Friday morning. Rather than just jumping off of my diet I’m trying out a “reverse diet” back up to maintenance calories. The reason I’m doing this is I always have a huge “rebound swing” on diets and put 5 or so pounds back on very quickly. Sure some of this is glycogen replenishment and water retention, but I start eating ahead of my metabolism recovering. I’m trying something different this time so we’ll see how it goes.

This coming week doesn’t have a whole lot exciting in it. Some highlights are bringing back some of the strongman implements as I’ll do sandbag marches on ME Lower day and Axel RDLs on DE Lower day, and the fact I built a new homemade pulley system for my gym which you can see here https://www.instagram.com/reel/CqIvh5HAN0y/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link . I’m not quite at maintenance for calories yet but am eating more so I’m hoping my ME days will go a little bit better this week.

I’ll drop back in at some point later in the week. If you’re reading thank you for stopping by my blog and keep training hard!