Weight: 244.5
Went to the Tuesday jujitsu class since the vagaries of the Torrance YMCA has a 2 week down time between sessions. I haven't been to this one for a while so there mostly a whole new bunch of people. The kids class had me working with an autistic behavioral terror. Very challenging kid to work with, and he kept having to get sent off the mat to calm down and re-compose himself. I managed to get him to do a few of the techniques in some semblance of god order. Master Bellman told me after class that he actually kept at it better than usual and that it must have been my low-key persistence. Nice to hear.
The adult class had me working with a petite Asian woman about half my size but very attentive and eager to go right at the techniques. We all worked on some yawara which is the really old school name for jujitsu and closer to the Chinese chin na that jujitsu developed from once it hit the home islands in Japan. It involved a lot of rotational twists of the wrist on its internal and external axes which in turn rotates the whole arm right up to the shoulder joint. With enough rotation the bones, muscles, and ligaments of the arm winds up like a rubber band and eventually the shoulder begins to drop as the downstream limbs run out of slack. Then something tears, breaks, or you learn to go with it and fall to limit the potential harm. Not unexepectedly, she had some trouble causing my wrist and arm to rotate. She thought it was because she wasn't strong enough, but with a lot of incremental repositioning of her fingers and thumbs on my wrist and metacarpals, I managed to show her how to get the right leverage to make things move. I tried the small, brief, and short coaching cues like Rip teaches at the seminar and that seemed to work pretty well with her.
Then there's the lifting.
5 minutes warmup on the bike. (Medium Day)
Bench Press: 225 for 5 sets of 5, PR! I finally got this. I can remember trying to get 4 reps with 225 for years in my late 30's and early 40's and now I managed this. Since I'm reduced to remodeling my form on the standing overhead press with much lighter weights, I'm going to try a max single in this next.
Curls: 110 5 sets of 5.
Claw Grip: 220 2 sets of 5. PR!
Stretching and foam rolling. A nice take away this morning.
Weight: 245.5
Thanks Sully. I did a GXP today in a hurry and had to ditch the post routine foam rolling and stretching. I overslept and my sleep in general has gone to the dogs. I keep waking up with one or both hands asleep or tingly dead and achy. Really miserable.
BUT: the knee is feeling really good and nearly 100% like there was nothing wrong with it. I only wore the brace as a safety factor in jujitsu Tuesday night and not at all otherwise this week. The OTC anti-inflammatories seem to have come through, and I'm going to ease off on them for a day or so to see what happens.
Weight: 246. Hm, looks like I may have been premature in celebrating some weight loss.
5 minutes warm up on the bike. (Light Day)
Lying Tricep Press: 100 for 3 sets of 12.
Squats: 135 for 3 sets of 6. The hip drive, depth, low bar and narrowing my grip width seem to be coming together a little at a time.
Power Snatch: Sets of 3, 50-60-70-95-95-95.
Early in to work again this morning, so once again I had to hustle out with no stretching or foam rolling. But then again, my back feels more solid than it has in 10 years, so maybe I can dispense with this. Funny how squats and deads seem to have fixed it when I avoided both for over 10 years to protect my back.
10 years of being a bad bad Mark. Even when my back is messed up I find a way to squat and dead.
Isn't it funny how we can prematurely in celebrating weight loss without even knowing it. I've watched the Perfesser struggle with it for almost as long as we've been married. I recognized it, yet she couldn't. Still can't. I believe we are all guilty of it at sometime or another.
Is that lying tricep press doing you any good?
I did things like hip belt squats and trap bar deadlifts along with back extensions to keep things going. But it ultimately did nothing to keep the back solid. The lying tricep press seems to have strengthened them for the recent improvement in the bench press.
Weight: 243.5
Our dojo is still working out the vagaries of finding a new location, so no jujitsu on Saturdays for a while. Instead, I went to Gold's and did a GXP and finally got some much needed stretching and foam rolling done.
The weight thing, I am coming to the conclusion, is a result of an extraordinary workload, high velocity of events, and chaos at work alternately knotting up my stomach into loops and then near starvation resulting in too much food at once. I am revising my previous statement further upward. This has now reached the level of converting the Ford Thunderbird factory in Pico Rivera to prototyping of the B2.