Deth

I woke up feeling fantastic this morning. I had a great night’s sleep for the first time in I don’t know how long. Why, I don’t understand why, but recently, I have not been sleeping that well. I think more than anything, it’s just the fall funk.

I woke up fairly early and relaxed on the computer while enjoying my morning coffee. It was a chilly morning outside and pretty chilly in here too. I waited a little longer to head out into the garage and let the sun warm it up a bit to take the chill off. The heater is one, but it’s still drafty in there. Once the trash men came and took the trash away, I put away the can and got changed to Head out into the gym for my squats.

It’s a new cycle for my 5/3/1, so the weight was a bit lighter. I was feeling a little tightness in my knee during the warm-up, but it was fine and improved as I got moving more. The warm-ups all felt pretty good. For the PR set, I had to go with two hundred and forty-five pounds for five reps. I wound up making a decently easy ten reps before I got bored with it. They felt really great, and the video showed nice fast squats. They were about as near as perfect form as I think I could ever have to go along with that.

I recovered a little from that effort while unloading some weight to get at my twenty rep widow maker set. This set took a bit longer to work through than most weeks. The problem was that my legs felt tired at this point from the earlier set of ten of a pretty heavy weighted squats plus all the squat cleans I did in the WOD yesterday. That’s not even mentioning the fact that I did the double dumbbell snatches from the day before. In the end, I got through them, and they felt pretty good.

Music For the lifting was Avernus

Later on in the day towards later afternoon I started thinking I wanted to think about doing next Saturday’s WOD. They offered a dirty work version with the Strongman Sandbag, and it’s been quite awhile since I’ve used that. I took it outside on the patio since it was in the mid-40s and decently nice weather outside for a December day. It was a bit breezy but not too bad. The sun felt great, even though it was pretty low in the sky by then. I should have gotten out there earlier!

The WOD itself was a twenty-five minute AMRAP of three to for Strongman Sandbag over the shoulder, then ten push-ups and fifteen air squats. I went on the lower end and did three over the shoulders around, since it’s been probably a couple of months since I’ve played with the D Ball. I’ve been really focusing on dumbbell work. For the WOD, I used the hundred and fifteen pound one and got through 13 rounds total. That surprised me a bit since I felt like my approach was going to be just pick away at it one rep and round at a time. I mean, I did take that approach, but I must have been moving faster than I thought.

The first three rounds I went far too fast, getting through those in a little over four minutes. I slowed down after that, purposely taking a breather for a second between Strongman Sandbag reps and a few seconds before starting the first one, and really focused on setting them up. No need to allow it to get ugly. They didn’t get ugly at all, in fact, they felt and looked great.

About ten minutes in, the WOD was more of a put my head down and get through it type of WOD as my legs were burning out. I started treating it more like a chipper, but being a twenty-five-minute long WOD, that’s really exactly what it was.

That strongman sandbag really has been a great addition to our fitness toolkit. I love all the other stuff, but it’s just fun to toss around a hundred plus pounds. The odd object aspect of it is really useful because most things you might have to move in real life are odd objects. I look forward to using it a lot more next summer and even on nice days this winter.