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[nenjin]

Just be careful about your lower back, especially when you feel capable of adding or increasing weight. Throwing yourself up from the flat position with a weight on your chest can stress out your lower back a little, or a lot, depending on how good of a mind-muscle connection you have to your abs. If you're doing 30 though, I'd assume it's pretty good. A tight, engaged core is the best way to protect your lower back during pretty much any exercise.

[NRDL]

I'd recommend rowing more often, Nenjin. The upper back is super resilient, and very helpful for OHP. I've been rowing 6 days a week and it feels great.

And with the OHP, frequency is key. Training it at least two times a week is good. 3 if you can.

[nenjin]

Between Monday 3 sets of OHP, 3 sets of pulling to the bar, 4 sets of Face Pulls, Wednesday 3 minutes of the rowing machine, 3 sets of Sitting Row, 4 sets of Face Pulls, and 5 sets of Deadlifts on Friday, I feel like my back gets a good amount of work. It's my lagging shoulders that are really the issue. Years of bad posture and slumped shoulders, some slight impingement and just not good direct mind muscle connection to them just need time and strengthening.

Really I'm to the point where there's more exercises that I want to do than I have time or energy for. These days 3 solid workouts feels a bit like a struggle. At 4+ I'd probably start feeling overtrained or, at least, under recovered.

I'm hoping that when I'm done leaning down and start getting maintenance calories at least, I'll have more energy for possible more workouts. And I'll feel like maybe I can stop with a generalized program of trying to hit as much in a week as possible and go for more targeted workouts.

[NRDL]

Do you just do full body 3 times a week? I've seen people do different variations of overhead press on each day. Just swap out an exercise you don't really care about and insert some pressin'. Boom, much increased frequency.

[nenjin]

I do an upper lower split, 2/1. But that's biceps, shoulders, lats, chest, abs, back, total body work like Kettle Bell Swings. I used to do full body circuit training but then went for standard 3x10 on each muscle group before moving on to the next.

So sure, I could ditch any number exercises to make more room for pressing. Do I actually want to, at this point though, is the question. I also tend to gas out pretty hard because I'm not used to hitting the same muscle group multiple times a session (except when it comes to my back mostly.) So after my OHP, my shoulders feel pretty shot. Side lateral raises are way harder after my OHP. I try to be careful about my shoulders because after a while, I do start to feel pain and impingment in my left shoulder, and pushing through multiple sets and exercises tends to make it worse.

So I don't disagree I could put more work in to my OHP. But I can say the same thing about pretty much every muscle group. It's just a matter of prioritizing what's important at this time. And for how much I feel an exercise when I haven't done it in a week or two, I'm kinda loathe to dump some stuff to make room for others. About the only muscle group I'm ok letting lapse is my triceps, because I honestly have better tricep development than most other muscles.

We'll see though. Around the end of the year it's time shake things up. Maybe I'll make 2020 the year of teh shoulders.

[NRDL]

Dew it.

[Arx]

I don't know if I did it to myself exercising or by some other bizarre method, but I seem to have done something to my left longissimus muscle (the muscle running up your spine, but not directly adjacent to it, and terminating in the neck). Straightening my neck and thoracic spine triggers a pain consistently near my left shoulder blade, occasionally all the way up my neck. Getting someone to pull my arms back knuckle-to-knuckle relieves it for about twenty minutes or so, but it always creeps back.

Does the musclemind know anything offhand? Should I just go see a physio?

[nenjin]

Where you feel the pain isn't often the source of the problem, it's often a symptom of it. Unfortunately I'm not a physical therapist but.....kinda sounds like the issue might be in your shoulder though. Can you keep good posture with your shoulders back and does it give you relief, or does it cause you discomfort?

Usually when I have a problem like that, I just stretch everything in the radius of the problem. Generally nothing is going to "fix it" though, it just takes time.

But you might try stretching your traps on that side, lats, mid back, pectoral.

[Arx]

Pulling my shoulders back doesn't really help, no. The reason I'm particularly suspicious of the longissimus is that it feels like it's more tensed up than on the other side. I'll try getting in general stretches and see if it helps.

[Ulfarr]

I'm having some trouble with romanian deadlifts and I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.

Sometimes I think I'm doing it correctly, feeling the usual workout burn in my hamstrings but most often than not I  feel that burn in my lower back. I'm a bit afraid of injuring myself so I've been restricting myself in using low weights (1-4 kg/hand) and doing only a few reps.

[nenjin]

Push dat ass back. Usually when I feel my deadlifts in my lower back, it's because my hips aren't far back and low enough so I start rounding my lower back on the way up.

I think the tendency is to use your lower back as a braking force on the way down. The last time I threw out my back deadlifting, that's how I did it. Rather than sitting my hips way back until the bar hits knee height and then dropping it down, I'd basically lean forward and use my lower back to control the weight. Which is an instant recipe for injury. A large part of it I think is trusting your quads and hamstrings to deal with it. I often don't and subconsciously I engage my lower back.

Also recently I've just tried to....really engage every muscle during a deadlift, especially on the negative. "Push through your feet in to the floor" on the positive is a tip that helped me feel less injury prone during the lift. I've also really worked on bracing my core prior to the lift, and really trying to engage my glutes right after lift off and on the way down. Usually you're supposed to squeeze the glutes near the top to push through, but your glutes attach to your lower back so keeping them engaged on the way up helps take the tension off your lower back to some degree. Try to preserve that arch in your lower back throughout the lift. It's when your lower back straightens out under heavy load (in my opinion) that it locks up and gets hurt.

Fatigue is definitely a thing with deadlifts too. My last sets are my heaviest but they're also my sloppiest because I'm tired and drained. When I'm really fatigued I'll often just cut a set short; it's way better than trying to push to failure, deadlifts are just too risky for that for me. I'd rather have 4 good reps than 4 good reps and one rep that leaves me laid up for two weeks.

Let's be clear though: you will always feel something in your lower back on deadlifts, it's impossible to take it out of the equation completely. Learning what is just your lower back feeling worked, and what is it being OVERworked, is part of the process. After throwing my back out deadlifting I was very gunshy about it, but since I've kind of learned what feels like too much and what just feels like work.

If all else fails, record yourself from the side view while doing your Romanian deadlifts. You will very quickly see where shit is out of alignment that way.

Maybe Alan Thrall can be of some help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEy_czb3RKA

[itisnotlogical]

I just completed a goal without even realizing it: I can do lunges now!

I used to despise them and couldn't do more than one or two without something to hold on to. Now I just did them and only stumbled a few times. I still prefer not to do them around say, a coffee table I could fall on, but I just busted them out like they weren't anything.

I'm also finding that when I take a break, I feel fine after a lot less time spent resting. 30 seconds of deep breathing and some water and I'm good to finish the circuit before I quit and start cooling down.

[AzyWng]

Did a bit of Kendo practice earlier today.

My arms are skinny enough that someone could crack a joke about being able to smoke them and I would totally understand them.

Usually I try not to think about it that much, but, well... I got reminded of that fact today (Especially during some of the later exercises, which include short hops back and forth while you swing, and one-handed swings).

[nenjin]

I'm also finding that when I take a break, I feel fine after a lot less time spent resting. 30 seconds of deep breathing and some water and I'm good to finish the circuit before I quit and start cooling down.

Pretty crazy right? That first stage of adaptation where you really start recovering faster than you did when you first started working out. That was my "aha, this shit is working!" moment when I started.

Careful on the water though. It doesn't pay to fill up in the middle of your workout. I try to keep it to sips just to wet my mouth and cool my throat a little. Today I actually got distracted, or was just really wrecked, and actually chugged a bit.

Usually I try not to think about it that much, but, well... I got reminded of that fact today

Eh, just remember that if you're happy with your body and reasonably healthy....fuck em.

But change is pretty fun, and exciting. It's fun imagining a different version of yourself and watching it come together.

Today I really confronted the fact that I've been in a rut for a while. I haven't been progressing my weights for many months, I've been avoiding some exercises I know I need to do, like a second day of curls or chest dips, because they're some of the hardest for me and I don't feel like I often have the energy, recovery or time to fit them in. Or adding more shit to my leg day than just squats and deadlifts (I need to get back to do doing side lunges, glute bridges and Bulgarian split squats again. It just felt like too much when I was starting to low bar squat and deadlift so I didn't want to push myself to injury. But that was many months ago.) I've swapped out some exercises here and there, like landmine oblique twists instead of weighted oblique crunches. Dumbbell overhead raises instead of lat pull downs. But all of them at starter "I'm not really sure if I know what I'm doing" weights. Rather than attacking the exercises I do know with more weight.

Truth is I'm just starting to feel the effects of getting lean, and people are not joking: ya kinda start feeling shitty. And when you're hitting the gym still, you have a pretty good metric of how it starts to effect you.

This has been a fun little experiment. I've held the one variable I truly have a grasp on, daily calories, steady for almost a year and a half. And while my calories have stayed the same, I have watched all the other stuff change. Musculature, Body Fat, Motivation, Overall Energy, Work Capacity, etc and so forth. It's kind of fascinating looking at the body mechanistically and to in some ways treat it like a machine.

But to be honest, I'm ready for this cut to be over. Not because I'm dying to eat more food, or stop keeping a fairly consistent diet and pigging out......I wanna see what I can do for myself when I'm in a calorie surplus. I'm 5'11" and probably between 185 and 190. I could conceivably put on another 10 to 15 pounds of muscle before hitting my probable genetic limits. Damn hard to do that when you're burning off everything you eat though. And I'm just a little tired of feeling like I'm struggling more to do less in the gym.

Make me wonder how the guys who stay shredded year 'round manage to stay there so consistently. (The natural ones, that is.) Not because ultimately I think it's hard to do so but...you must need to adapt to operating at just slightly above maintenance calories while still pushing yourself and lifting until it's no longer an issue for your body. Because the trip down there...definitely has its challenges. It's not the hunger. It's not necessarily the mood or the daily energy that I have a hard time with, although I've noticed these things. It's when I'm in the gym and trying to give maximum effort that I really feel the deficit. I've adapted to where I'm at in my workout, but going above and beyond that is something I've been putting off pretty much in every area. Keep saying I'm going to push my deadlift but don't. Keep saying I'm going to up my squats, but don't. Keep saying I'll up my lat pull downs, but don't. Keep saying I should push my OHP but what I'm at already feels pretty damn challenging. Truth is, I probably should push all my weights up to the point where I can do 5 to 6 reps and make that the new normal. Doing so will be an order of magnitude more difficult though.

But today I did go do a very small set of dips in the morning. I can do maybe two to three decent ones, so I guess I'll start there. When I tried to do them a year ago I was NOT ready and my shoulder absolutely let me know it. Now with some proper form and a lot more back and shoulder stability, I can get a few in. Really, kind of like I alluded to in a previous post, I think I'm hitting the point where I feel like everything is at a decent base line for myself personally, and now I need to start specializing a little on the specific things I care about.

I'm kinda torn. Part of me is like "just cut out the last bits of garbo out of your diet, go low carb for a month and get this cut over with so we can hit the gym harder and grow." The other part is like "You started this put to a number to how long it takes to get lean without eating and living like a fitness model. Don't quit at the last minute because things are actually getting tough now." And one verrrryyy tiny part is like "Just start eating more now."

Just gotta remain patient, I suppose.

[Ulfarr]

Thanks Nenjin