Week9 - Day24A - DOMSoreness

Weight:  178.4 Duration:  11:35am - 12:17pm ~ 42min.

Inner thighs are still suffering some serious DOMS.  Snowstorm Hercules swung by so some friends and I went up to do some snowboarding down a mountain.  Haven't snowboarded in...4 years.  Lots of falling, twisting and putting my body in weird contortions.  I realized how little stamina I had.  This is definitely to be expected.  Strength training, to some degree, will exercise the heart, especially as poundages go up.  BUT, the kind of work being done, at least on the StrongLifts regiment consist of short 2-3 second spurts of stress under load.  That's it.  There is no doubt that 5 sets of 5 reps near maximal effort will definitely get the heart rate going.  However, the stamina I'm talking about is endurance stamina.  CrossFit'esque I guess you could say.

I've intentionally left out conditioning at this phase.  My primary goal before I'd like to start adding conditioning is to first regain close to the strength I had before my shoulder surgery.  This means, 5x225lb squat, 5x275lb deadlift, 5x145lb bench.  I haven't included the Press here because, well...I haven't been doing them.  My next and potentially final appointment with my shoulder doctor is this coming Thursday.  My shoulder is still fairly tight during squats so I will definitely remember to let him know.  I haven't been consistent with my daily stretching, but I have been wall walking with my arms during workout days.

Squats:  3x5xBar + 5x95 + 3x115 + 1x135 + 5x5x160

Shoulder was pretty tight today.  I was trying very hard to dig the bar down lower, but shoulder just wouldn't budge.  It got a bit better on the later sets.  Legs were already suffering from some DOMS.  Luckily, I didn't feel much of it during the lift, but still had a presence when walking around or going to sit down to rest.  Last 2 sets were really good, shoulder locked the bar well in place and raised my elbows up to keep it locked in.  I made a conscious effort not to look straight ahead since it would be putting my neck in a very compromising position and instead tried to imagine keeping my neck inline with my back, kind of like the picture in front of Mr. Rippetoe's Starting Strength book.  I saw that my butt was going up faster than my shoulder on some reps so I'll have to watch out for this.

Bench:  3x5xBar + 2x5x65 + 3x85 + 5x5x100

Used a with-thumb grip.  Used less tuck.  Felt the load a bit more on the shoulders because of this.  Right triceps were working a bit harder.  Drive my feet through the ground helped a lot towards the last few reps of the last set.  Consciously made sure to squeeze the hell out of the bar and keep whole body contraction once I unracked the bar.

Rows:  5x55** + 3x75 + **1x95 + 5x5x115

Felt some of the reps in my low back.  I was definitely jerking some of these, especially towards the last 2 sets.  I banged the bar on my knees on the way down on one of the reps.  Definitely felt pretty terrible and painful, but luckily it was mostly the bone and not the soft middle part of the knee which would have hurt quite a bit more.

Accessories: **Seated DB Curls:  8x25 **Preacher BB Curls:  8x50 Standing BB Curls:  10x40 Incline DB Press:  10x35 + 15x30 DB Bench Press:  10x35 Pushups:  3x8xBW

Arms were pretty beaten up today.  My forearm is still sore from the snowboarding.

*Core: *Pushup-Position Planks 3x30sec.

Should've done 35 seconds per set, doh!