mikschu’s BodyBlog

My goals over the last year have evolved from strict bodybuilding to functional sports training.  The program used to be one body part a day, 167583 sets per body part, maybe 1 or 2 compound movements each day.  How different things are now!  Only compound movements now, 4 different ones, 3 days a week.  I run as hard and fast as I can.  I don’t worry about going to intense on my sprints or taking too long to run in the hills.  I’m not worried about burning off precious muscle (I eat an elephant every day anyway.)  I stopped focusing on what I looked like and instead started thinking about how to push or pull more weight.  I started doing research to find ways to improve my speed, stamina, strength, power, agility, etc.  As a result I’m more athletic than I’ve ever been in my entire life.  My waste is thinning and I’m not losing any strength, in fact I’m gaining.  My strength-mass ratio is increasing and that feels awesome.  I don’t intend to be a mongoloid beast that can’t run, I want to be light, bouncy, athletic, but still very strong.

Anyway for the last couple of weeks I’ve been doing a pyramid-style rep scheme and it proved to be a good change to shock my muslces into new growth.  Not only that but I was so excited to do it that my performance and strength were insane on the very first one and I was deadlifting 285, military pressing 135 (with a little bit of a split jerk but a good negative.)  My reps were 12, 9, 6, 4, 6, 9, 12.  The first couple sets were really like a very thorough warm-up; the 6, 4, 6 sets were the real bulk of the workout, and the last 2 sets were like a nice burn-out.  Doing the pyramid helped me break some mental barriers with heavy weights when I got to the 4 rep part. Now I’m going back to the regular 6 rep scheme for 2 weeks, then 8, then 10.  After I complete 10 reps I’ll probably do another pyramid because it will have been 6 weeks by then.  I may do a something different, like 15, 10, 5, 3, 5, 10, 15.  Who knows what I’ll be feeling like then.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 8:34 am and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.