Dsher10’s BodyBlog

CLICK HERE -> My intervirw with Gunrock for “Senior Citizen Health and Wellness Tips”.

It looks like I need to concentrate on the top-end of my lifts, so I will be doing a lot of 3-board lifts augmented with chains. I’m about 11- weeks out from my next competition and look forward to breaking through my old nubers; I’m tired of slogging through the 200’s! Time for a change! 300’s, here I come!

I’ve been at the same Monday routine for quite some time now; traps and lats which, of course, are important for big benches. However I haven’t directly worked my chest or shoulders for several months. Unfortunately there are not enough days in the week to hit all the necessary muscle groups and still give my body time to recover, so something had to give. But I feel my benching may be suffering from the lack of chest/shoulder workouts.

So I’ve decided to alternate between back (traps/lats) and chest/shoulders, every OTHER Monday. This should give each area time to recover yet allow me to work both muscle groups. I hit chest today with both flat and inclined dumbbell presses and decline machine presses. As I haven’t done these in a while I worked up the weights slowly and didn’t push to my max (plus my darn back was acting up). I ended up with two setgs of four reps with 90 pound dumbbells on the flat press (I’ve done 110 previously) and eight reps of 70 on the inclined (I’ve previously played around with 85’s but never really pushed it).

Hopefully I will recover in time for my bench training on Thursday.

After my warm up today I began what will be a series of workouts with floor presses and chains designed to help me with my lockouts. In this first workout session, which introduced me to chains for the first time, I had to find my "working weight". Doing triples, I started with a base weight of 185 pounds on the bar. I first added a pair of 20 pound chains (40 pounds total), raising my lock-out poundage to 225 (pretty easy). Next I added another pair of chains for an 80 pound addition, raising my lock-out poundage to 265 and did three reps (a bit harder). Finally, I added a third pair of chains for 120 pounds total addition, raising my lock-out poundage to 305, and did three reps - my max. I proceeded to do three more working sets of triples with the 305 total, but had to have some assistance on the last reps.

As with all new exercises, the chains take some getting used to. But I’m quickly getting a feel for them, and they are fun! I look forward to blasting through these workouts, making some great gains!