Squat Every Day: Week 4

Day 31. The one day hiatus.

Week 4 continued to be difficult both mentally and physically. Mentally it was less to do with being bored and more to do with just being tired and run down. In the last 50 days I took 4 days off of work. One of those days we still came in for a team meeting. Another one of those days was a slow-pitch tournament in some of the hottest weather so far this year. The remaining two days were a CrossFit competition.  In all of those 50 days I also trained all but three days. So I didn’t really have any days off. Add onto that I have two big projects for work I am currently working on outside of work hours (creating a gymnastics program, and creating movement standards for the gym) and I am working towards getting my OPEX Certification (the biggest demand of the all). So needless to say I have officially packed my schedule full and maxed out my brain usage. As long as I can schedule things in and keep up with each day’s “ToDo list” I am usually good to go, (I like having things to do to keep me from getting bored) but over the last monthish I have struggled to do that. Starting today that is changing though. I have learned a lot about myself over the last month and have already crossed quite a few items off my “ToDo List” today that have been on there far too long.

Sitting back and looking at it all I am happy with the progress of my squats and with how much I have learned about myself.

Recap of GAINS in 30 days:

-Back Squat 1RM: 310 -> 345

-Front Squat 1RM: 270 -> 295

-Deadlift 1RM: 400 -> 418

-Back Squat 10sec Pause: 255

-Walking Lunges: 200m X 3, 4 days/week

-Close Grip Bench Press stayed at 270

-No Sore Joints

I figure I can max out for about a month straight before I absolutely have to take a day off. I am not totally sure how much my work-load has influenced that but I hope to figure that out in the next couple weeks to a month. The plan is to take today and crush out some work I need to get done over the next two days, then take tomorrow and have some time for myself. I still work in the morning and the evening tomorrow but I can sleep in an extra hour or so (till about 6:30) and over lunch I am not going to concern myself with work at all. Tomorrow is a day that when I am not at work I will be simply relaxing and hopefully reading a book which has nothing to do with work at all. It will most likely be Game of Thrones so I can let my mind go to the fantasy world and check out from this one for a few hours. That is something else I have learned about myself. I need to take an hour each day or a couple hours every 3 or 4 days and mentally check out. It comes with physically checking out to a certain degree as well. In a perfect world it is just me and my book for a solid two hours. No people, no work, no fitness, no noise, and no caring about what I eat (if it is in the middle of the day). Once I get through these two days I plan to get back on the Squat Every Day wagon and the “ToDo List” wagon as well.

To the squats and what I did in week 4. This week I ended up taking out the serious gymnastics training and one of the CrossFit classes I added last week. I kept in some fun and unstructured gymnastics work which ended up being lots of handstand hold and handstand walking practice as well as some core work like hollow and arch rocks. I also kept the competition team training in on Saturdays. I have managed to keep almost all of my different variations of squats at the same number over the last week but Day 29 and 30 of Squat Every Day brought along some misses at numbers I had achieved before. That was the final alarm going off as to how much my body can handle. Thus the reason for my rest day tomorrow.

Hopefully after a day off and getting work sorted out over the next couple weeks I can continue to see results. One new thing I am going to introduce is to have a “fun squat day” every Friday (Funsquat Friday). Last Friday I did back squat @275 in the following pattern:

1 Back Squat every :30s for 2 min (5 reps)

rest 2 min

1 Back Squat every :30s for 1:30 (4 reps)

rest 2 min

1 Back Squat every :30 sec for 1min (3 reps)

This week another coach wants to do the “3 bars of death” so I’ll do that with her. It incorporates deadlift, back squat, and press. You load the bars with whatever weight you want. Once you declare a weight for an exercise you have to stay with it. You can only do 1 rep of each exercise per round. You accumulate 10,000lbs as fast as you can in however many rounds it takes you. Sounds like fun right?

Links for the previous weeks:

Squat Every Day: Week 1

Squat Every Day: Week 2

Squat Every Day: Week 3

Till next week (I’ll let you know how “3 bars of death” goes), Stay Positive, Be Better, and Go Get It!