First off, thanks for the mention, Andy. This last weekend was great. I was lucky enough to go to Park Forest, IL with my beautiful wife and compete in a powerlifting meet. It was the first time that I have done powerlifting since 2007. I ended up tying the personal records that I had set the week before on the squat and on the deadlift with a 250kg/550lb squat and a 320kg/705lb deadlift. I was very happy with both of those numbers and it was great that one of them ended up being a state and American record for the AAPF. In the bench I managed to get 140kg/309lbs up, but that was down twenty or more pounds from where I was planning to be; I don't know what happened earlier in the week, but I somehow managed to put a pretty bad strain on my pec minor while I was benching at about 60% for sets of two. The strain caused me to have to bench with a narrower grip which was interesting. It was a little disappointing, but I don't much care about bench, to be honest, so I was still happy to hit 140kg easy with a narrow grip.
I was happy with all of my numbers, but I had to adapt my training more than usual while I was nearing the end. This was because it had slipped my mind, kind of, that I had been training for 16.5 weeks leading up to to the point when I realized this and that I would be needing a pretty big taper if I wanted to compete safely. I was starting to feel pretty run down and my numbers were shaky in all aspects of my lifting, which, for anyone who knows me, is something that doesn't usually happen during a training cycle. Feeling tired is a normal thing, especially with my programming, but I usually recover within a day or less and feel ready to go again. I was staying sore for two, sometimes three or four days and always feeling sluggish so I knew something was up. I decided to start tapering volume and intensity about two weeks out instead of my normal one week taper; it ended up working out well and allowing me to maintain the peak that I hit the week earlier, so I was pleased with that.
The reason that I had been training for that many weeks in a row was actually two-part. The first was that I had just been training to train and to test a new program that I had put together which included set-matching, a post that I wrote about earlier this year. I ended up seeing a lot of progress after six and a half weeks, which was great, but when I found out about my powerlifting meet and a strongman competition, I decided to use to program to train for both... So I took three days off and started my training for the strongman competition. The first five weeks of my program were devoted to training for it and then the last six were for the powerlifting meet. I say devoted, but by that I mean they were just the focus. Since my strongman training portion uses powerlifting and weightlifting, I was technically training for both; then my last two days of the week were strongman practice. After the competition, I took one of my strongman practice days and made it a powerlifting meet practice day. So, like I said it ended up being a long training cycle with a competition at the end. Haha...
I will post the video of my strongman competition as well, I wrote a bit about it back in February. It was a great time and I was able to get second place. I was happy with the progress that I have made in becoming better at the events -especially in the stones, a previous major weakness of mine.
Anyways, the videos will be below and as Andy said, if you have nay questions be sure to let me know!
Well, I apologize, but I cannot upload videos longer than a minute it seems, so here are the links below. Feel free to watch them if you have about 5 minutes!
Powerlifting Meet Strongman Competition
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