With three consecutive trips to the gym on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, it made sense to take a rest day on Sunday. But rarely do I do things that make sense. And Sunday's WOD included lots of overhead squats! So you know I was making my way over to the 10am class. The WOD was half-strength, half-skill. Although the skill was all-strength, making the WOD 150% strength. I think that's right.
The first part of the workout was a quest to find our 10 rep max for overhead squats. There has been a lot of overhead squatting recently and no one has been happier about it than me. After testing out my 1RM for overheads for the first time a few weeks ago, I would now get to try something a little bolder. Except I had no clue what my 10RM should be. My guess was in the 145-155 range. That would turn out to be a decent guess, as the online calculator I looked up on my phone gave me an answer of 153 based on my 1RM of 205. So my 10RM should be approximately 75% of my 1RM. Good to know. Except Keith would tell us a few minutes later that, for overhead squats, the number should probably be closer to 65%. That would drop me down to 135. I was determined to beat that.
The class was made up of Jill A., Jill C., Jill R., and Jill S. (Jill R. was Regi and Jill S. was Scott, but why break a pattern?) Like yesterday, we were in the annex, but the annex at 10:15 in the morning felt much different than it did at 8:30 the day before. It was sweltering in there. Scott and I had an awesome sweat battle going on throughout the class. The three girls grabbed racks and worked out near the open door in the back of the annex, while Scott and I worked from the racks near the front of the annex. Keith advised up not to do too many sets of 10. In fact, he told us that it wasn't necessary to warm-up with sets of 10. Sets of 4-5 reps at lower weights would be fine before testing our 10 rep max. With that in mind, I did a set of 5 reps at 95 and 115 before doing my first set of 10 reps at 135.
Taking the bar from the rack is such a huge benefit as opposed to having to snatch the bar up over my head. Yesterday's post covered all of the issues I have with my snatch. When using the rack, all I'm doing is jerking the weight and 135 is pretty easy to jerk. From there it is mainly stability. Given all that, I was confident that I could handle 65% of my 1RM for 10 reps. That first rep can be a little tricky as I'm feeling out how stable I am, but as long as I'm not under tremendous duress, I can usually start knocking out rep after rep rather fluidly. That was the case at 135 as I got through 7 or 8 reps quickly before stopping, re-establishing my balance, and completing the remainder of my reps. The set went so smoothly that I bumped the weight up to 155 for my next set, with the intention of trying 165 if that went well.
As I was taking a couple of minutes to recover from that set, I watched Scott do his next set. Scott is a big guy who is new to our gym, but will likely be throwing around huge amounts of weight in the very near future. He has some mobility issues as far as squatting goes, but he admitted during our warmup that he is getting much more depth now than he was when he first joined the gym. He put the bar over his head and began to squat, but he was struggling. I immediately noticed that he had the same problem that I did when I first began squatting: staying in the heels. He was way up on his toes for each rep, causing him to be off-balance, which is the last thing you want while attempting overhead squats. After dropping the bar, I asked him if he was wearing lifting shoes. He told me he wasn't, and after inquiring about his shoe size, I offered him my shoes for his next set. I was really glad that I did. He didn't get through the entire set of 10, but he wasn't even close to coming up on his toes during his reps. It was a much cleaner looking set. Scott asked me where he could get shoes like mine as he handed them back to me. Something tells me that with the right footwear, Scott is about to improve leaps and bounds with his squats.
The one downside in lending my lifting shoes to Scott was that I only allowed myself enough time to do one more set. I re-focused, grabbed the bar from the rack, and jerked it over my head. I did a smooth set of five, then paused. Another set of three before my next pause. I did rep #9, took one last pause, then got rep #10. The Googlewebs did tell me I should be able to handle about 155 and well...
Still, I was a little bummed that I didn't get a chance to try 165. If only there was an hour and a half strength class right after this one. <Sigh>The last 10 minutes of class were devoted to practicing legless rope climbs. These had come up in class before, but I haven't tried them because...I'm a big wuss. It took quite a while for me to wrap my head around climbing the rope using the J-hook because it meant having less security on the rope. Instead of the rope wrapped around your leg, you were only clenching it with your feet. Now I wouldn't even have that. I would only have my non-existent upper body strength. I mean, what could go wrong? It's not like my weak grip could give out while I was 10 feet off the ground, right?
As Keith was explaining the variations of rope climbs to us, I cut straight to the chase: what happens when we're dangling high off the ground holding on only with our hands and our grip is weakening? Answer: grasp the rope with your lower body. Perhaps I should have included the fact that my body awareness skills are not at their peak when I'm in a full panic. Another lesson for another day, I suppose. Jill A. was joining me in the adventure up the rope sans legs. On our first attempts, we both got about halfway up the rope. Jill took a couple more attempts and I was certain she was getting to the top because a) she has more upper body strength than me and b) she was under control so much that she could stop and restart again during her climb. My strategy? Get up that rope as fast as possible before I ran out of strength and plummeted to my demise. On my second attempt, I made much more progress, to the point that if I had the rope secured with my feet, I might have been able to reach up and touch the 15 ft mark. Holding on with one hand and attempting that was not an option. Suddenly my grip was failing and I started sliding down the rope with my fingertips taking the worst of it. Not good.
Jill reached that same point a couple of times, but was unable to finish the journey to the top. I decided that I had enough grip for one more attempt. I took a big jump and furiously pulled one hand after another. Near the top, I slowed, but the mark was so close! I made one big pull and got my hand just below the mark. The thought of dropping the barbell with one last step to lunge the other day entered my mind and I had no intention of doing that again. I pulled one more time and managed to get my other hand to the 15 ft mark. And immediately I started coming down the rope, with the skin on my fingers slowing my descent more than my legs were. I had made my first legless rope climb! And all it cost was a chunk of skin on the middle finger of my left hand. Small price to pay. (Ow!)
By that time the 10am class was over and 11am strength had begun. Michal and Rachel had shown up and were there for my successful legless rope climb. In fact, Michal had given me a pep talk ("just fucking do it!") in advance of my climb. This was Rachel's first time back at the gym in over a week, so naturally she was maxing out everything she did. After chatting with them for a while, I put my lifting shoes back on so I could try 10 overhead squats at 165. I had cooled down a bit from before, so I wanted to do some warmup with 135 to make sure I could handle this. And those few reps were not smooth at all. Perhaps I should reconsider. Then I thought about something that had pissed me off earlier in the week. That was enough motivation to go and load the bar to 165. I was attempting this even if I failed on rep #1.
Maybe it was the added attitude, but as I got the bar over my head and started doing reps, it didn't feel as bad as the reps I did with 135. Although I immediately noticed a problem. About 9 months ago, my wrists started bothering me as I did overhead squats. I had wrist wraps, but I never used them. But when you experience enough wrist pain, you become a convert. I wear the wraps a lot these days, but especially when I do overheads. I had taken them off for the legless rope climbs and forgotten to put them back on. And now I was experiencing what a difference they make. As I got to reps 7 and 8, my wrists were not pleased with me. But at that point, it was too late to stop. Like at 155, rep #9 was slow and followed by a pause, but it was also followed by a successful 10th rep. It might not have made the KOP blog (Keith had already submitted results), but I could say my 10RM for overheads was 165.
With that out of the way, I worked a little bit on back squats with a lower setup. They still didn't feel quite right, but I did a set of 5 at 185 and set of 5 at 215. Then I remembered that I needed to work on getting out of the hole on my squat cleans. Tom C. had recommended doing front squats with a pause, so I did 3 sets of 5 at 165 with a 3 second hold at the bottom. While getting ready for my last set, I mentioned to Rachel I would be on the rower next and she wanted to try and get on the white board for fastest 500M row. She needed to beat 1:39 to get there. She started out very strong, but was slowing a bit at the halfway point. Her split of 49 seconds was still on pace to get on the board though. The next 100-150 meters were not at the same pace, however. She came on strong again at the end, but hit 1:39 with about 20-25 meters to go. Despite almost stopping right then and there, she finished with a time of 1:42.6. I suspect it won't be long until she is on the board once again.
Inspired by that try and mildly curious about how fast I could go, I decided to give the 500M time trial a whirl as well. To get on the white board for the men, I needed a time of 1:31. My best time for 500M was 1:40.7, so I had no delusions about cracking 1:31 on this row, but I did want to see how close I could get. The answer was not very close. When Rachel started, her 500M split was below 1:39 almost instantly. At no point during my row was I under a 1:31 split. I did keep it together in the 1:32-1:33 range for quite a while though. I also struggled just beyond the 250M mark before trying to bring it home with a quality finish. My time:
It's the number on the bottom
Sunday's rest day turned into a ton of work, but learning my 10RM for overheads, getting my first legless rope climb, and a PR on my 500M row made it worthwhile.
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