14 Apr Dan Dalenberg | Week 3 | Lower Deload

Currently in offseason mode, rebuilding up to the 250s and working towards the Atlantic City RPS/XPC meet on August 29^th.  

Planned deload this week and turns out I really need it. Sumo pulling has been going fairly well but is taking a toll on my hips. All of my squatting was uncomfortable today, ended up cutting it short. Not injured, just beat up and likely need to make some small adjustments to sumo pulling volume.

Training

Squat- 50% x 5 x 1

Like I mentioned, pretty uncomfortable. Ended up doing 3 singles at 330 instead of 400ish x 5 x 1.

Deads- 50% x 5 x 1

Changed back to conventional. No pain thankfully. 315 x 5 x 1.

Leg Curls- Working on my pump bro. Something x 3 x 12. Who really cares what the weight was?

OB/GYN Machine aka Good Girl/Bad Girl machine aka hip machine thing- Again, something x 4 x 12. Every time my hips get beat up I do this thing to get some blood pumping. Always helps and gets me right. Definitely made me feel better.

Finished feeling better than I started. Certainly needed a down week and will likely be back to conventional pulls most weeks.

BONUS- Rules of Thumb Suck

My training log has been super freaking boring lately so I wanted to include a little extra thought for today.

Rules of thumb suck- when applied rigidly. This is a common mistake lifters make, we are given a simple piece of advice and take it as gold, applying it without flexibility. Some rules of thumb that so often are applied extremely rigidly are related to picking meet attempts. A really common “rule” would be that you should always open with your best double or triple.

Seems like decent advice. We can all agree that your opener should be easy and should probably be something you could have hit for a couple reps on meet day. There’s the catch. It should be something that you could double or triple on the day that it matters.

Strength is not linear. You are bound to have crappy training cycles and a lift be a little off throughout a training cycle. Take Jordan’s RUM8 squat prep for example. Jordan is an excellent squatter and has been in the game for awhile now. The guy clearly knows when his squat is at peak strength. During his prep for RUM, he knew something was off and the strength just wasn’t quite there. I think his best double or triple is around 725, but he decided to open at 677. Given how the prep had gone, he felt that a more conservative number was the safe bet. Had he rigidly applied the opener rule, he would’ve picked that PR double he had hit just a few months prior and probably would’ve been opening too high for strength level on meet day.

Be flexible with lifting “rules.” Pick your opener based on what makes sense for that training cycle and how strong you actually are, not how strong you used to be.

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Daniel Dalenberg

Dan Dalenberg is a pro level raw and equipped powerlifter with elite totals in the 220, 242 and 275 class. Best official raw meet lifts include an 804 squat, 507 bench press, 715 dead lift and 2006 total. Best equipped lifts include an 950 squat, 715 bench, 735 deadlift and 2400 total at 242. Dan has been training under Brian's guidance using the 10/20/Life methodology since late 2010.

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