Although I haven’t written about it in a while, I remain focused, preoccupied and probably obsessed with my weight training. Obsession has a bad reputation, but I think this is a pretty healthy one. Obviously there are physical benefits to regular exercise, but more importantly for me, there are emotional and mental benefits. The training keeps me focused on a goal, it gives me something specific to look forward to each day, and gives my life some semblance of a purpose. Let’s face it, there’s not a lot of point to this living thing. I’ve heard it said that contentment requires three things: Something to do, something to look forward to and someone to love. My training covers two of the three bases.
As usual, I tinker with both how I structure my training and my overarching goals. My love is for powerlifting, despite my age, small wrists, elbows and long limbs which make me a poor candidate for success in the arena. However, it’s not like there’s money in it. I’m not trying to be a professional powerlifter (if there is such a thing). I’m trying to enjoy what I do and have tangible goals and markers of progress. Training strictly for hypertrophy is fine and good, but harder to measure progress and lacking a definitive goal like a competition. There is natural bodybuilding of course, but I can’t even imagine such a thing.
The issue with powerlifting for me is the lack of competitive events in my area. In fact, the only competition even reasonably within my reach is in December in Columbia, which is a good 2-hour drive. While I plan to compete in it, I don’t need to train for powerlifting for 12 months to compete one time. So my training needs to be hypertrophy focused until the meet is a little closer and that’s what I’m currently doing.
However I have not taken my own advice consistently this year and have continued trying to train for powerlifting until recently. I place the blame for the return visit of my medial epicondylitis squarely on my desire to try Westside Barbell style training again. I ventured into it because I thought it would give me the best of all worlds: Some strength work, lots of hypertrophy work, and a little athletic work. Unfortunately, right after my first Dynamic Effort Bench day, doing speed bench against bands for accommodating resistance, my elbow caught fire and has not subsided yet.
After a few weeks of Westside–and spending money on new bands–I gave up on it and tried another powerlifting/hypertrophy hybrid but the dreaded Sumo Deadlift gave me a quick tweak in my left hip (despite working on strengthening my glute medius for months now) so I finally took the hint and reformulated my training to specifically focus on hypertrophy. Interestingly, Stefi Cohen recently mentioned in one of her YouTube videos when she was chatting with Dan Green that getting to a powerlifting meet without injuring yourself along the way is 90% of the battle. So I think my experience is rather common.
I lack upper body size so I have been focused on changing that for quite some time. I’ve made great progress on my traps as I mentioned in my “bulked” blog post recently, but my neck is a thin stack of dimes holding up my head, and my shoulders are narrow, so I’ve started neck specific training and I was working hard on my lateral deltoids, which has added to my list of aches and pains.
The tendon where the delts attach to the bone has made its presence known, annoyed by all that damn abduction I was doing. So my arm basically hurts from the elbow to the shoulder. That makes doing a lot of things uncomfortable, not just lifting weights. Nonetheless, I persist. I’m working around the injury so I’ve removed all direct shoulder work and will continue to make changes that allow me to keep training without further aggravating this issue. I also continue to do at home physical therapy with the help of my YouTube friends Bob and Brad.
While this may sound like a negative update on my raison d’être, it really isn’t. I continue to set PR’s, my traps continue to grow as do my hamstrings and biceps. I’m talking noticeable growth, which as I’ve discussed before, I think is due to the relative lack of training those muscles receive from most strength specific programs, which I’ve been so fond of for years. One of the key things I learned in the Henselman PT Course is that hypertrophy is a localized phenomenon. By local I mean right down to the muscle fiber level. If you don’t specifically train a muscle, its hypertrophy will not be optimized. It may get some peripheral stimulus from a compound lift, but squats won’t cause your biceps to grow. Only bicep training will do that. Sure, they get work from pull-ups or pulldowns, but to get all the growth you can out of them, you need to train them in the way they’re anatomically “designed” to move. Same goes for all other muscles.
I also remain relatively lean, even as I have started a new round of bulking. I’ve been adding 100 calories each week as my weight has continued to decline. I’m currently at 2600 daily calories, which is a very comfortable level of food for me, but I’m probably going to have to add some more next week as I’m still losing weight. Like I said, I’m pretty lean.
Okay, so I’ve gotten all my thoughts on paper and all this typing doesn’t exactly help my sore elbow. Until next time, blank blog post page.
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