13 Jun Zane Geeting, Friday night skwaatin and pullin, kicking off week 2

I’m currently in an off-season training cycle focusing on bringing up work capacity and some weak areas. For this cycle I will be using my summer 2 day split. In these summer months I get extremely busy with work and the farm, so I have less than optimal time in the gym. With the split that I’m currently using, I still get in enough work to make good progress and set myself up to go into my competition season (fall and winter) ready to peak and hit PR’s. As far as meets go, I know I’m going to do the XPC at the Arnold again, I’d also like to hit another meet in the late fall/early winter, but haven’t picked anything yet.

This week Dirk, Brandon, and I trained in the garage. We’re working a large sale event at the dealership, so I had put in 25 of the last 48 hours between work and driving. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I got to the gym a half hour late, but I knew that the plan was to work up around 85% on squat for 1 or 2 reps, then pull something in the 75% range for 8 reps. This was all planned to be based off of feel, and use an RPE of no more than 7-8. Here’s what I did:

Warm up

Bird dogs, McGill’s, Cat/Camel, BW squat

Belt only squat

Warm up to 510×2 reps. Cut the first one just a little on accident, didn’t sit back enough.

Sumo deadlift

245×5

445×3

535×1 (this felt like shit, so instead of going up for my working set, I chose to stay at this weight and not exceed my RPE)

535×8

– Obviously this is a far cry from the easy 585×8 I did a month or so ago. But to be fair, I was using a stiff ass bar, and my daily life conditions were less than optimal.

Rack rows with swiss bar

3 sets of 10, up to 275 lbs.

Reverse hyper

3 sets of 15, up to 300 ish lbs.

Calve raise/Machine shrug superset

3 sets of 25 each.

– That was the end of it. It was midnight, I was tired, and I had to be back up at 7am for work. I slammed my PWO shake, drove home, showered, ate, and hit the sack around 1:30am. This obviously allowed for less than optimal rest time, so I hope we don’t get too slammed today at work.

– This session shows the example of my rotation on training right now. The first session of the cycle was squat volume, followed by squat and deadlift accessories. This session (week 2 of the rotation) was low volume on squats, with some higher rep pulling, then accessories. The accessories were kept to less volume because the overall volume of the compound movements on these weeks will be higher. So, next week will be back to more squat volume, and squat/dead accessories.

– Exercise selection after the main lifts started with the rows for the upper back. While this isn’t necessarily a weak area for me, it is weaker than usual, and a very important factor to keeping my deadlift strong. When my upper back and lats are strong, my pull is good. From there it was just a few light movements; reverse hypers to build the erectors for squatting and deadlifting, and to flush the lower back with blood. When you have a long torso like I do, you have to make sure its very rigid, this means a lot of core work, and reverse hypers have always been a staple for me. The added benefit of the movement is that I can flush my lower back with a lot of blood. Its hard to do this with something that doesn’t load the spine, and because of the fact that its not a very vascular area. I’ve never found anything else to duplicate this effect. The last two were calve raises for knee stability, and shrugs for the shelf/setup. I did both with very high reps in a supersetted fashion as I’ve found them to respond to this very well. Both the calves and traps are high volume muscle groups that you use all day, every day. It only makes sense that you can train them with higher reps than most other movements.

So anyways, that’s it. I’ll be back in the gym on Tuesday night for the second part of the bench rotation that I’m running. Stay tuned for that.

The following two tabs change content below.

• Bio
• Latest Posts

Zane Geeting

Zane Geeting is a pro multi-ply powerlifter with best lifts of a 935 squat, 625 bench, and 765 deadlift. He is coming back to competitive PL after a year and a half layoff that was a result of several serious injuries including a severe rupture of the right pec that could not be repaired. Zane has an extremely busy schedule that would make most people quit before Friday. He works 55+ hours a week as a finance manager. As a renaissance man, he is also currently restoring a 140 year-old farmhouse and maintaining a hobby farm. Despite all this, Zane still finds time to train 2-3 times per week, as well as coach other lifters.  

Latest posts by Zane Geeting (see all)

• Zane Geeting, Training Update 1/15/2019 - January 15, 2019
• Zane Geeting, Off Season Training Update - January 7, 2019
• Zane Geeting, Last 3 Off Season Training Sessions - November 6, 2018