The Plan: Evolution

Did some mobility and corrective work, but not as structured as it has been. I suppose this could count as a day off. I have also walked over 5 miles.

Over the past week I have been giving a lot of thought to how I am going to go about hitting the DL and MP goals I’ve set myself this year. I want something that will follow on from the Secrets Of The dvd series and at least make use of some of the exercises on the last levels of each:

Single leg Deadlift - contra-lateral load
Barbell DL
Military Press
Turkish Get Up
Pull Up

I was ‘swinging’ towards doing ETK with Barbell DLs on one variety day and SLDL / TGUs / Pull Ups on the other. Fantastic, hits all the exercises above; swings and DLs obviously improves posterior chain and DL overall; while everything else is focused on developing stronger shoulders. But……

I think it will be too much for me all at once. I’ll probably get wrapped up in doing more and more swings. From past experience I reckon I will increase my food intake, especially with sugary stuff, and will pile on the weight with overwhelm.

I want to take it slower, and I can narrow in on the strength aspect better by just doing DLs and MPs. I can focus on cardio later in the year to break things up if I plateau. There are a lot of other benefits I can think of like including TGU/SLDL/PUs as part of corrective exercises and also better control of eating and energy levels as my protocol is self regulating on this score. By that I mean I shouldn’t ever be really tired and feel I need to eat more to counter this.

What I am talking about here is daily singles of roughly 65-70% 1 RM for DLs and KB MPs. Like my previous experiment I’d do a couple of lighter singles to determine working weight for that day and then wrap it up before I started to get tired and the weight felt heavier. Or to put it another way – finish, feeling stronger than when I started.

This is a pretty subjective system which I had good success with before. I would be looking to start off conservatively and probably wouldn’t do as many reps on DLs with MP work still to be done. I be looking to do it everyday but a day or even two off every now and then is no big deal.

Obstacles that I can foresee are finding the right volume of DLs and MPs so that both have a chance to improve. For example a session of 15 x 110 DLs and 3 x 24 MPs isn’t going to help me press 40. And then there is also the fact that 24kgs is 60% of 40 and 32kgs is 80% so I am never going to be able to hit that sweet spot of 65-70%. But I can only work with what I’ve got and I still think that it will work out.

I have a few levels of shoulder corrections to go through but I am improving rapidly and it shouldn’t take me past the end of the month to complete. Then I am going to implement the above.

So it is written, and so it shall be done.