I haven't done any serious pulling in over a month, and man, my hands and thumbs hurt.
And here's a tip: roll one side of the loaded barbell onto a tiny weight to elevate it slightly off the ground (or mats) to make adding and removing plates easier.
Wish I did this earlier!
8 mats, about 6 1/4" from the ground, or an inch or two below my knee caps.
Trying to be more explosive on the concentric phase of the squat, and try to pop the bar off my back and a rattling sound with the plates as I stand up. Seems to be easier to be explosive on the high bar squat than the low bar squat, at least for me.
Also, wore the Three Wolf Moon shirt today. Here's a pic I took a couple of days ago:
Here is my new secret weapon(s) to increase my deadlift:
Ok not that much of a secret, because I found out about it here: ROM Progression Method.
The idea with ROM progression method is to increase the range of motion over time.
I kinda-sorta played around with the ROM Progression Method before, doing rack pulls in my power rack, but that was a pain in the ass to adjust the safety bars every time.
I had to set the safety bars on my rack to the right level, which involves pulling it out of the holes from front-to-back, and sliding it back in at the right level, all while listening to the screeching sound and feeling the vibrations from metal sliding on metal contact.
At the same time, I didn't use my B&R bar for rack pulls. I used an old, no-name crappy Olympic bar that I got from Kijiji. I've read that rack pulls done in the power rack runs the risk of bending whatever bar you're using, and I did not want to bend my best bar. The crappy Olympic bar is a bit thicker than the B&R bar, and the chrome is peeling off. Also, it barely fits inside of the safety pins of my power rack.
Well, getting my deadlift up has been a bit of a mystery to me, but partial deadlifts seemed to have helped before.
So, I figured I might as well do this right and pull from rubber mats rather than doing rack pulls in the power rack.
I had some left over rubber stall mats, so I cut them up resulting in 8 pieces of roughly 18"x24" rectangles. I also purchased 8 x 18"x18" rubber paver tiles from Home Depot ($7.99 before taxes and free shipping!).
With a total of 8 mats on each side, this raises the bar so that it's about 2" below the bottom of my kneecaps.
So right now I have 8 mats about 3/4" high. One week, I'll do my mat pulls with 8 mats, and then the next, I'll remove 1 mat so that there will be 7. This will be repeated until I am pulling from the floor.
It'll probably take a few "cycles" of this to reach my goal of a 600 lb deadlift.
I was going to start this yesterday, but ended up grocery shopping and then eating a hamburger instead.
Rep PR's and Other Training Updates
Hit some PR's this past week:
5RM: Low Bar & High Bar Squat: 430 lb x 5
2RM: Bench Press: 340 lb x 2
Overhead presses has been crappy lately, so I'm going to replace them with some good old fashion clean and presses. This should provide a "deload" from heavy OHP (because the weight I can use for C&P is limited by what I can clean, which is lower than my press), give me an opportunity to work on power (or muscle) clean technique, and get a little more yoked.
