Training Board

Week VI of my 8 week training cycle was… weird. It was finals week, my last week of the term, starting with exams, continuing with grading, and ending with graduation. As a college professor, my life is naturally broken into cycles, and, I need to learn to build my training schedule around them, because, as I saw this week, these kinds of transition periods really hammer my routine and my resolution.

Body Recomposition: My average weight bumped up by two pounds (to 198 lbs) as I ate off plan, abandoned IF, and drank more than I should. And slept less. My waist also balooned (to an average of 36.5″, up by 1/4″). Skinfold remained unchanged (at 8mm). So I was bloated and inflamed, obviously, and not recovering well. I saw a high point of 200 lbs during the week and had only two days at the low, 196. Saturday morning I woke up with a resolution in mind to fast and get myself back on track, which I proceeded to do. So, at least the week ended with my wresting control back from the capricious “id” that had taken control of my behavior.

Training: I’m still nursing that injured back. This makes three full weeks of disrupted training. Not that I didn’t do nothing… as the blog attests. This week actually had an extra training day in it — I completed a swim workout on Tuesday! First in a long time. That was fun. Swimming on Tuesdays will be a regular feature of my week going forward in the weeks ahead. I also had a very active Thursday (doing work around the house and yard); so active, in fact, that my strained back flared up mightily by the evening and was still sore on Friday. I had done some good conditioning during the week, and felt ok about everything, but by Friday I was spent and drained and… that was it. My workout didn’t go far beyond what I call “warm-up” and my “rehab” work.

Starting to look forward to finishing out this current cycle and shifting gears in the next, especially since this particular eight week stretch really didn’t go as planned, what with an “injury” stopping me from heavy lifting during its second half. I have some good thoughts about where I’m going next, though, so, yeah.

Currently I am slogging my way through an 8 week training and body recomposition cycle, and just finished the fifth week. But I am starting to regret not simply cancelling my current cycle after injuring my back on the first workout day of week four. Because since that day, Monday, April 23rd, things have not gone great. My body recomposition plan has continued on without the benefit of being able to do my full strength and conditioning plan, but it has also been hindered by my discomfort and the general malaise that pain brings. I haven’t stopped exercising but I’ve stopped training. And I haven’t abandoned my goals in either training or body recomposition but I am more or less holding steady in the latter while I undoubtedly have regressed in training over the past month or more since I was already engaged in a reset — i.e. working with weights well below PR territory — when I injured myself and have now, I’d wager, lost real strength.

Injury: the injury to my back, now almost two weeks old, is already taking longer to recover from than I’d hoped and is starting to cause me real concern. I have not considered the possibility that this is an *orthopedic* injury… God forbid. I pray that it is not. I felt much better on Monday after doing some light squats at high reps, and chin-ups, so, maybe, I should do more of those. The romanian deadlift work I did on Wednesday either didn’t help or actually hurt. And the sandbag runs I did on Friday definitely hurt. So those are OUT going forward. Also, I’ve neglected soft tissue work in the second half of this week and really need to get after my back with a lacrosse ball and foam roller every day.

Exercise: the best I can say about this week is the following: I made my target numbers on burpees bringing the week’s total to 90; Wedensday’s workout made my glutes and hams sore as heck on Thursday, and my forearms got a blistering workout from the FatGripz and Fat Bar; and I got in my chin-ups on Monday with two more reps than I had the previous Wednesday. The injury is holding me back and I will need to change up my program again in the remaining 3 weeks of this cycle in order to baby my back. During the coming week, in addition to light high rep squats, look for me to note doing back-targeted floor work and calisthenics and mobility work.

Body Recomposition: average daily weight was up slightly this week, to 196.4 lbs, but overall, statistically, it has been flat through all five weeks of the current cycle, since it started out at 196.5 and has never fallen below 195.6 or gone above 197. The average weight for 5 weeks has been 196.3 and so I have stayed within a standard deviation of plus or minus .7 lbs, which is nothing. On the other hand, the evidence clearly suggests I’ve lost fat and gained muscle in this time, since my average skinfold measure dropped this week to 8mm, down from 10mm in week 1 and prior weeks (this suggests a reduction of BF % by 2% or more!). That tells me my plan is working. My average waist measure was up very slightly this week to 36.24 (from 36.17) but, besides being nearly “flat,” this is also down by 1/4″ to 1/2″ over the past five weeks. So things are looking good in the BR area… although it’s hard to take pleasure in it when I am hurting too badly to deadlift.