Last week was another solid week of training.
My arm is moving better each week and my patterning as a whole is improving. I’m still only testing once a week, for two reasons. One, I need a fair amount of patterning work and testing limits my ability to throw with the volume I need. Two, I’m not currently recovering quickly/well enough to test twice a week.
At some point I may increase the number of high intensity days each week, but for now one seems to be working well. Here are my results from last week’s testing:
The previous weeks’ average and peak are in parentheses.
Roll-Ins
Red: 83, 84 Tied PR (A 81.8, P 84)
Yellow: 89, 89 New PR (A 85.5, P 88)
Gray: 94, 89 Tied PR (A 92, P 93)
Rockers
Red: 78, 78 (A 77.8, P 79)
Yellow: 82, 84 (A 82.3, P 83)
Gray: 88, 87 (A 86.3, P 88)
My arm didn’t feel amazing going into this testing day. I knew it would be a game time decision when I got to the facility about whether or not I would test, but I decided to roll with it. I’m pleased with the results so far because I’m still not moving how I want to be and there are a lot of opportunities for improvement. This makes me optimistic about my ceiling since there is so much room to get better and my results are still pretty solid.
This was also my last week of my current training block. Here’s how I would evaluate this training block:
My focus was extremely narrow in terms of trying to improve power output with relatively little focus on everything else. Having done a conjugate style of training in the past (in which multiple qualities are trained each week) this was a bit of a change for me. Both styles of training have merit, but I think the conjugate method may work better for me. I maintain muscle mass relatively well and hypertrophy is not a significant need for me at this point in my career, so I think both methods can work, but I also think my volume may have been too low during this block.
The bar speed I was looking for was there for the most part (I track this on my main lifts), and fatigue was relatively low. I saw some improvements in my med ball throw velocities, which was encouraging. I also used some of my medicine ball drills as opportunities to work on patterns I need to improve through the use of positional constraints (more on this in a future post). I have a lot more work to do, but I’m excited to see where this goes.
The next block will be planned slightly differently with these critiques in mind.
Anyway, thank you for following me on my journey to the show and check back later this week for more content!