You know that little voice in your head?

Well, I’m gonna take mine out into the desert some evening and no one’s gonna find the body….

I was inspired by an interview with Zack Even Esh that I heard today. He talked a lot about training outside, which I wasn’t quite ready for. I’ll start that soon, but he also talked about training densely, meaning hammering out a bunch of tightly packed sets and being totally destroyed.  So I thought I would try for it. It was much harder than I expected. I also used some borrowed programming although it’s pretty standard for me.

Warmup:
Jumprope
light hang cleans
light snatches
one arm snatch

Hang clean and jerk 5 X 5 60K
These were difficult. A lot more difficult than I expected. Each rep was a clean grip dead to a high hang clean to a jerk. I tried to do the jerk correctly, off the collar bones with no push out.

Olympic Squat 5 X 5 140K
This is the part where I wanted to kick my own inner voice. All I could hear in my head was that I counldn’t or wouldn’t do it. In the end, it was much easier than expected. It was very hard but it was easier than expected. I pretty much felt done after this.

Military Bench 3 X 10 135 lbs
I found that I wasn’t doing the military bench correctly so I had to make some adjustments. It is done holding the feet off the ground, above the height of the bench. It appears that it is also done with a full stop on the chest on each rep. So I did that, each rep stopped, not just paused, stopped on my sternum, then up. I should point out that at this point I lost my whole go quickly and take short breaks thing. I chatted with a high school basketball coach looking for tips to increase my athletecism (speed, agility, explosivity).

Pull down 3 X 10 100lbs
I used the widest grip possible on this one. I’m gonna totally suck on pull ups at Dan’s contest so I look at this as training for next year.

I threw in a couple abs sets in there to work out some kinks. Showed a lot of people my kettlebells that I brought with me. I did get a good smoking out of that first couple exercises. I really didn’t want to do those squat but I got them done. When I was done, I was gassed but felt like I had a lot of strength left in me. It’ll be interesting to see how these higher reps squats workout over time.

In random diet news, I had to take the belt one notch tighter, that was a surprise.