Last weeked I had a pretty good week in the gym, hitting a squat variation PR on my ME day and felt altogether good during the training week.

Since then, not so much…

No sweat at all, training isn’t linear and I’ve wound up doing some variations I’m not really used to or have experience with. When you’re doing something for the first time, expectations need to be tempered.

For my ME lower day I decided to pick a sumo deadlift where I sit on the box and pull it while coming off the box. It was awkward and to be blunt, I’m not sure I’ll be doing it again but there are a couple notable things it pointed out for me:

• I suck at any sumo variation and if I’m not consistently doing sumo, I need to set targets really, really low
• With some work I can squat to parallel in a sumo stance, which I never could before
• There’s a way to make this variation a useful accessory and I may toy with that in tomorrows DE day

If you want any reference on how bad I am at sumo, at one point in time (this was a good 5-6 years ago) I pulled a max conventional deadlift of 475. A couple of weeks later I decided to try and pull sumo and hit a whopping max of 275… So the two lifts were 200lbs apart. Its not that bad for me anymore, but its still bad. My max conventional sits at 585 and 500 even for sumo.

Moving on to upper body, I’m still fighting my shoulder. I expected this to be a solid few weeks so don’t expect any bench PR’s coming. I have however added a few things in that I’m hoping can be long term solutions to my chronic shoulder isssues:

• I’ve changed around how I do band pull aparts by turning my hands over, I feel this below my shoulders much more
• Hanging kettlebells from bands on the bar and benching during my warm ups. Some light sets with 12KG or 20KG kettlebells hanging before I do my work sets
• Stability drills added to warm ups

Again, I’m expecting at least a few weeks before I see any improvement, but I believe I’m on the right track. The right muscles feel like they’re working and my range of motion is fully in tact. Those are good signs.

Tomorrow is my DE lower day which I always look forward too, going to try that sumo box variation as an accessory. If I like it you may see a post!