Upper body only to heal hip flexors

[JoeyNor]

If I wanted to irritate my hip flexors, I would do high rep narrow stance/toes forward squats.

Yeah, that’s my experience as well after a few days doing them. The pain was almost gone yesterday, but it certainly got worse last night after doing a set of 20 with only bw using a TUBOW. Could barely get up the stairs afterwards.

[JoeyNor]

Yeah, it does suck for sure. I've been accumulating the hip flexor / knee pain over a period of time where I should have backed off, or maybe went back to doing those lifts only 1x per week. I seem to be able to make progress with a top set (heavy) and really light drop sets for volume while only doing them once. Bench is different, and I try to do something every time I lift. Hopefully I can get back to fully training by August. Otherwise I will just do a bench only meet in December.

For upper body especially, I am really a fan of higher volume to maximize hypertrophy. The prime movers for bench and press are so much smaller, so why not try to get them as big as possible while still training neural efficiency with heavy sets every week? Just to give you an example, this week for bench I had a top triple @ RPE 8.5ish (I could get one more for sure, the second would have been all out), and since I hit my target weight for the week, I stuck with my drop sets at 70% of my max for 6 sets of 5. For the drop sets, I take 1:30 - 2 mins on the clock max between sets. The top set changes weekly, and the volume will change a little monthly. For heavy work, I don't like to grind. I seem to hurt and wiped out doing it. I save that for the meet. Then I get to walk out of there all crippled up. ;-)

For my assistance work, I mainly do machines, dumbbells, or barbells (for curls). I try to stick in the 12-20 rep range for most stuff, with 15 sort of being my target. I typically do 3 sets of each assistance exercise, but over time I will push some of them up to 5 sets.

Here are some examples of the lifts I am doing: standing barbell curls, barbell preacher curls, db hammer curl, cable curls (sometimes single arm), cable tricep extensions (rope, bar, reverse grip, single hand, etc.), incline press machine, rear delt raises (dumbbell or cable), overhead press (assistance because the competition lift is bench).

I do things in super sets to save time. So I will do a curl, then a tricep movement. After that I wait about 30 seconds and repeat the process. This is all fluff work really designed for hypertrophy. If something hurts, pick a different exercise. Don't get jacked up doing the bro lifts. :-) Pick lifts you like to do. I used to do dips, but they messed my bench progression up. But if you really like them, and the extra work is boosting your bench, I would stick with them.

One thing I found since I focused mainly on powerlifting for years is how weak my bicep curl is. I can pretty much out lift anyone else at my gym on the big 4 (raw at least), but god my curls suck. I don't think I can strictly barbell curl 95# for 3 sets of 12 yet. I did 85 this week and it was hard. So I feel like this will make my arms bigger, which is really a positive.

I stopped doing dips when attempting to start the SS program 3 months ago, and I had never done any BP until then. Because of that I don’t know if they will mess up the bench yet, but I’ll keep that in mind if I don’t get any progress the coming weeks. Yeah, I pretty much have the upper body of a 6 year old girl, so if the increase in volume causes some kind of growth along with the strength it will be a nice bonus

[kinkar]

I was having hip pain issues and cracking that i kept trying to push through to keep progressing. It was a hard pill to swallow but i decided to give it a rest to prevent permanent damage. After taking about a month off from squatting the pain mostly subsided but was still present. Im back on a linear progression with squats and have no pain. When i started again i did high reps with low weight in a slow controlled experiment downward until i found what was comfortable for me. The hip pain was completely gone after a couple sessions done in this way and I resumed the classic starting strength squat progression.

[JoeyNor]

I was having hip pain issues and cracking that i kept trying to push through to keep progressing. It was a hard pill to swallow but i decided to give it a rest to prevent permanent damage. After taking about a month off from squatting the pain mostly subsided but was still present. Im back on a linear progression with squats and have no pain. When i started again i did high reps with low weight in a slow controlled experiment downward until i found what was comfortable for me. The hip pain was completely gone after a couple sessions done in this way and I resumed the classic starting strength squat progression.

Good to know it went away in the end! I’ve soon been 4 weeks without squatting with any weight now, and only done bw squats with a TUBOW and high reps for rehab. Unfortunately it’s still flaring up afterwards so this might take a while...