8 week Testing Results

8 week testing at the 5 Points Attitude Adjustment Academy is done. The squat didn’t make the cut onto the video. To be completely honest, I didnt think it was impressive enough, to me, to add in. Not that I wasn’t happy with it, I was, but I didn’t feel it was worthy. I will go into this in another post, but as for now, I am going to leave it at that.  As a bit of a refresher, I have been training with Wendler in his garage. We are using, obviously, 5/3/1 with some modifications. I wont speak extensively as to the modifications, as we are testing material for a future 5/3/1 book. When is it going to be written? Thats up to him. Now that you have seen the results, here is what happened in each of the lifts, training-wise.

 

Overhead Press: This lift was the one that made the biggest jump for me. I remember how I actually found my actual max for this lift. I was over at Jims, and we had done some random stuff. The bar was on the rack, and I gave it a go. Warmed up for it properly, and went to 185. I MISSED IT. Waited a couple of minutes, MISSED AGAIN. One more try, and it went up. Also managed to look worse than the 225 in the video above. That being said, it was a 40lb PR in 8 weeks. Not like I went from 275-315, but I will take it. Learned a lot about the lift its self, as it had literally been over 7 years since I have done any pressing overhead consistently. Realized that this is a lift that I can NOT take to a 1RM. For future testing, it will be done as a rep max. Its not a competitive lift anyway, so long as I am close, and show some sort of progression, I will be good to go. My goal for this lift was 225×1. The highest I worked up to in training, after our working sets, was 185×5. All of our loading was based on a max of 160 lbs.

 

Supine Press: Another lift that I havent trained consistently since my Army days. Honestly, before going to Jims and training upper body stuff exclusively with the football bar, I honestly believed that elbow pain and the inherent instability from my injury wouldn’t allow me to do any sort of consistent upper body pressing at all. Was very wrong of me. I hit 315 for a new PR. Was also a 40lb PR from my best prior to starting, 275×1. The goal I had going in was 300×1. At one point in this training cycle, I worked up to 275×3; and all of our loads were based on a training max of 240lbs.

Deadlift: Our deadlift training, to be honest, was all over. As we are constantly testing out and trying new ways to do things, we rotated in a bunch of different things into our pulls for this cycle. Trap bar, Oly shoes, standing on blocks, etc. I pulled a very easy 675×1. 80 pounds off of my best raw pull, but thanks to some unfortunate circumstances at the time, I was pretty fired up and motivated to do something awesome. This is where I also mention I was 20 pounds heavier at that time too. The goal I had, considering everything that had changed during the cycle, was 657×1. I obviously hit that one pretty easy. I didnt take a max prior to starting this new training cycle. The heaviest I worked up to, prior to the 675, was 605×1, which resulted in a pretty sweet lat tear that kept me from pulling for 3 weeks. OUR TRAINING LOADS FOR THE DEADLIFT WAS 525lbs. This is a topic for another time as well.

 

Squat: The one lift that was the bastard of the four. Seemed that everytime I had a bar on my back, I felt like shit. Not horrific, just not strong like I did the other 3 lifts. I would like to think that it was a combination of changing literally everything about the lift, from stance to shoes to performance. I actually WALKED THEM OUT. Something I said I would never do again. Whoops! Time changes, and so do your outlooks and experiences. During training, I worked up to 465×10, and 500×2. Ended up taking a rep max for this lift, and hit a fairly easy 555×3. I could have done more reps, but the goal for this one was 550×1. Im not worried about the relatively low max right now, as that isn’t what my training is focused on. Slow and steady progress, and increasing my level of awesome is all Im worried about until about December. The I will switch gears. Our training max for the squat during this cycle was 485lbs.

 

All in all, a great training cycle. Save for the slight back I had because of the lat tear, everything went really well. Looking forward to the upcoming ones for sure. Jim and I have talked, and we are going to introduce some different ideas into our training, and slowly start to improve our strength aside from just merely increasing baseline levels.

Tagged as: bench press, deadlift, military, squat, testing, training