I competed in my first meet after a year break on November 24^th, 2018 and have recently moved across the country to Calgary, Alberta. Training will be ramping up slowly, but my focus will remain on my family and my professional endeavors. While I would love to compete again, I want to enjoy experiencing my new city and ensuring the success of a long-awaited business venture.  Stay tuned for more on that!

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To inquire about Paul’s coaching services, visit Master Athletic Performance

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If you haven’t yet, check out my most recent articles:

Silence Your Inner Eeyore

A Coach’s Guide to Handling Multiple Lifters on Meet Day

Rethinking Progressive Overload: A strong spin on Escalating Density

Exercise Spotlight – Pushups

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Well, it was worth a try!  If you’ve followed my log, you’ll know that I have been pulling sumo again.  Basically, I was thinking that since my hips were healthy, it would be fun to see if my back strength from the last few years pulling conventional would carry over to sumo… well it turns out my hips still hate sumo.  I gave it a good run, but I feel like I am fighting against myself the whole time and now it’s affected my ability to train my squat the way I want to.  So, I am ditching it.  Next week is a deload, so I will pull some light conventional and get back into it.  Lucky for me, I have been pushing my RDL’s, Good Mornings and previously my stiff legs, so my back definitely didn’t lose any strength.

On the hip front, I have been very diligent with rehab.  I do a 15 minute sequence 3x a day – morning, noon and pre/post workout (depending what I am training).  It has helped a great deal, but I think by continuing to pull sumo, I was just shooting myself in the foot.  I’ll continue with the rehab and hopefully avoiding sumo will only help me recover quicker.  The session above was a last ditch effort to see if I could stick it out, but you can see that the left knee just doesn’t want to stay out.  This is the same issue I had in my meet prep after the knee surgery, but this time it was far less severe – which is actually great news.  So, some silver lining there.  Got in a good session, but looking forward to pushing my conventional the rest of the off-season.  I will be picking a meet sometime in the late summer to try and push things hopefully.

Deadlift

1. 4″ block pull – up to 240×5 at RPE 8, drop down to 5x3sets at 190
2. Speed Pulls – 170+60lbs chain x1x8sets, e30sec
3. BB Pendlay Row – 4×10
4. CSR – 4×12 /ss GHR – 4×8/8/8/6
5. Facepulls – 4×20 /ss Ab Wheel with foam roller bt knees – 4×12

Warm-Up

1. Daily
   1. Walk – 10minutes
   2. McGill Big-3
   3. Full Body CARs
2. Lower
   1. 90/90 Hip Transfers – 6ea way
   2. Multi directional lunges – 2x10ea
   3. Tactical Frog with internal rotations – 2x10ea
   4. Goblet Squats – 3-5×10