Back to Bodybuilding

  It's been 94 days since I last deadlifted, combo of my quad tear, then shoulder injury and then for the last 10days I've been ill with a heavy flu. Still not feeling great but my gym itch was proper getting me, so I decided it was time to go in for a sesh. I kept the reps low as I'm still coughing up loads of shit, so decided to take a weight over volume approach, with extended rest periods also. Got to admit was soooo please. Good strength throughout. Started all my first lift with overhang grip and fat gripz. Kept the fat gropz on up to 160kg before I took them off. Here is my last set. Not too heavy with 210kg. But seeming it's been over 3 months, I was extremely pleased, as this would be a decent lift on a good day. Feeling like all my accessory work, which ticked me over during my recovery, has worked. Could have gone probs another 20kg-30kg heavier. But no need to push too hard too fast.

 First time back training legs, since I picked up a small quad tear on 23rd Decemebr. So after roughly 6 weeks of rest, I testing my leg with a workout of leg extensions and leg curl. My final set for leg extensions being on 215lb. Leg held out well, although it started to hurt on leg curl due to the pressure of the machine on my knee. So I ended after two sets of leg curl. But overall very happy, and at least I can now build up my confidence for squat! Hopefully within the month, I'll be back under the bar

  Using my brand new swiss cambered bar, never having used such a piece of kit before, i go to failure to test my strength. Managing 100kg 220lb for a new pb. I attempted 110kg and moved it a wee bit, but no cigar! Goalzzzz Hardest bit was the balance, stalling any momentum and making it a movement of multiple eccentric pause presses lol

 Chest workout from 20/12/23 I went in focused to do 2 reps on 150kg 330lb bench press. This was the sole aim of the workout, and I was planning to go on the fly afterwards, doing whatever felt right according to how easy the 150kg felt (and whether I got it or not) Warmups were simple and focused. No wasted energy. 70kg x 3reps [with pauses] 100kg x 2reps [with pauses] 130kg x 1rep 150kg x 2reps I felt tired slightly before training today. Was looking after the Mrs last week as she had covid, so less sleep and more stress than when I flew the 160kg up last week. As such I feel like if I went in feeling as good as possible the 150kg would have flown up on both reps. But as I felt a little loose under the bar, the 2nd rep was a good ol fight. So success, and I believe that this isn't deffo me at my best, so a good amount of wriggle room to improve. So I winged it after this, feeling like a wee set of volume on a light weight. Just to focus on building a small pump in the chest to st...

 Tested my current strength levels, on seated rear press today. Started on 100kg (2 sets of singles to warm up) before then going up 120kg. I didn't feel 120kg at all, making it much easier than last weeks effort. As such I jumped up to 130kg. I felt very confident and approached the bar with a relaxed disposition.  130kg flew up, perfectly even. Was tempted to push for more, but 10kg improvement in a week is more than enough.  I didn't want to tire my body. My Mrs has covid at the mo, and I don't want to make myself ill by burning the midnight oil too much. But I still wanted to hit side delts at least a wee bit. So I did a new exercise taught to me by my matey Skully Karlani. DB Discus. I used to be a discus thrower when I was younger, and it's nice to know that it must be like riding a bike, you never forget. Style felt smooth and the 9kg dumbell felt like a good choice. Overall I did 2 sets on each arm. Thanks for reading my weights journal. Big Al 💪 🍺 🦖 

 Today was a good day to deadlift. My last back workout was a proper lil failure. Struggling on weights that should have been easy, but today made up for it in spades. Started off with my pre workout conditioning on lower back, abs and core and I then did pre exhaustion work on leg extensions, leg curls and calf raises. Then the big boys - deadlift. Went up steady with warmups on 70kg and 120kg. Before then starting my first working set on 170kg.  For this working set I did heavy duty style, with eccentric pauses and negative descents. This was way beyond my initial expectations. As a result, I decided to leave the workout on a high, rather than batter myself with volume. So I went up just a little bit, up to 180kg, and did a normal set of reps. I managed a nice and breezy, lemon squeey set of 8 reps. I left it there, not seeing any point in burning more energy than needed. Walking out of the gym with loads of energy to grow, and on a high from my success. Thanks for reading m...

  Biceps day. Glad to be making arms now a regular thing. Having trained them only  a dozen or so times, over the last 10ish years. Now I'm training them on average about once every 10days.  Hopefully all the compound work I've done over the years, has worked them indirectly so they are not too far behind, but deffo need to make up for lost time. Opened up the workout with some prone banded curls. It took a little while to find my sweet spot regards the weight to be used, but settled on 150lb. Did three working Sets (heavy duty style). The pump of that was amazeballs. I could have even left the workout there, as my arms were all kinds of messed up. But I couldn't resist my fave arms movement - Preacher curls. I warmed up one set, on 12kg for 10reps per arm, before doing two working Sets on 18kg dumbells. The second set I went for 8reps per arm, forcing through with my spare hand, any reps I couldn't do. I made a point of adding a twist to each rep also. To work the pron...

++Quick note before I begin; I knocked the exposure settings on my camera part way through the workout, I've tried my best at making them watchable, but the video for the most part is deffo on the ugly side lol you've been warned!++ Focusing on front delts for the majority of today's workout, I opened up with seated rear delts. Aiming for 2-3reps each set, on an ascending bar until failure. It took a long time to warm up today, being freezing cold in the gym (the bar was giving my hands freezer burn lol), but I managed to get up to 120kg for a single (following a decent amount of work on the way up). Before then dropping the weight down to 90kg It was on 90kg where I did the majority of the work, the final rep on the final set was immense! A proper fight, and I was beginning to black out going for the lockout. So I deffo called that weight perfect, getting 2 sets of 4 heavy duty style reps (I was aiming for 3-4 reps on these sets) I then did dumbell presses. I was very tir...

 I'm quite proud of this back workout, I started off with deadlift.... and failed completely to achieve what I wanted. But I'm proud with myself for not giving up. I was hoping to do a few sets of 3reps on 200-220kg, but only just managed the same on 180kg. It may not sound like much, but from my perspective at the time it was terrible.  I tried several times to pull 200kg and it wasn't coming, and to add insult to injury, when I dropped back down to 180kg I only managed a single! Bombing out is always hard to handle. Especially as this has been the story of my deadlift for such a long time now. Only 2 years ago I did 20reps on 200kg in a single set! Perhaps now you can understand why I was upset - especially as I have no real answer, as to why? Yes I'm 30lb lighter than then - but I haven't lost any real strength on any other lift, so why just deadlifts? I walked out, angry and disappointed in myself, feeling like I'd been banging my head on a wall that just wo...

Roughly 3 weeks ago, I tested my strength on bench and I did really well. I did 155kg for a hard single and then tried 160kg, a brave attempt, but to be honest an absolute blowout. The bar touched the chest and then stayed there.  Since then I've done a couple of technical and specialised workouts, focused on building up my strength, especially at the mid point of the press, my weakspot. This part of the lift is where the front delts help the bar transition into the final lockout with the triceps. This hasn't always been a weak spot for me, and the reason it exists is because my cage is too narrow for me to place my hands as wide as I would like. As such, the shoulders are not able to distribute the weight as evenly as they would otherwise be able to, increasing the pressure they have to handle. It also increases the workload of the triceps.  So even though I have very strong front delts, being able to overhead seated press 145kg 320lb, I struggle more than I should. But a goo...

 #EverydayShouldBeLegDay Always happy when I'm squatting the bar. Last week was the first time handling heavy(ish) weights on squat, since I last peaked in strength roughly 10 months ago. It's always a shock at first, as even if the body has the strength, the shock of Weight on the structural parts of the body is still hard to overcome. As a result last week I only managed 1 rep on 200kg 400lb. However it doesn't take long for the body to be re-accustomed with its old iron friend. Today was the first major step in the right direction, with me managing to rep out 200kg for 6reps. This is good early heavy phase prep work - that will lay a good foundation for heavier work in 8-10weeks time. My hope was to do at most 3reps. So doubling that target was very encouraging, however it does mean next time I deffo need to put the weight up more, as ideally I should be doing sets of 3-4reps at the moment, with the idea of cutting the reps down to doubles and singles within a few weeks...

  Today's workout was biceps, which still remains a relatively novel thing for me, having gone the last ten or so years with probs a dozen arms workouts only to count. But becoming a regular occurance now, since I went back to training like a Bodybuilding roughly 6 months back. I still need to try and train arms a wee bit more regularly, but I'm averaging a workout once about every 2 weeks, so infinitely more than before when I was still powerlifting. Today my triceps are very much aching, from my shoulders workout 2 days ago, so just biceps today. Normally I like to open up with a heavier free weight based routine, such as EZ or olympic curls. Followed by preachers, but today I wanted to mix things up a bit. Variety is the spice of life. So I did some banded curls instead. This was a bit of an improvised routine as I don't have cables in my gym. But I love the feel of bands on movements like this. They dig in real deep into the muscle, and the pump is insane. I had no idea...