Heavy Squats Seemed Impossible Today But I Made Them
I thought that I slept well last night, but I woke up early and felt tired. Today, I am feeling both physically and mentally drained. The past couple of days I haven’t had much of an appetite, so I ate light suppers. Yesterday, I didn’t even eat anything for lunch. I think that’s where my problem is coming from. Yesterday, my stomach was feeling a bit off, and that made me not really want to eat anything. Maybe I had a little bug or something sticking in me. That feeling in my stomach seems to have passed now, but I think I’m just hungry.
After messing around with my templates on the computer this morning, I finally decided to head out into the garage gym and give my squats a try. I’d been debating if I wanted to even try them today or wait until another day. I figured if they did not feel right, I’d walk away and come back tomorrow or even later in the week or something. For me, I think the greatest advantage of all of them with our home gym is not having to fit our workouts into someone else’s schedule. Hell, I don’t even have my schedule. I like to get things done in the morning, but that’s not a set time. I can and often do switch things around to different days if it makes more sense or fits with how I’m feeling.
Even the empty bar felt heavy on my shoulders today. I was moving well enough, but it felt tough. I really was having my doubts about whether today’s squats would be a success or not, just from the feel of that. Gradually working up in weight, I took my time adding weights through the lighter sets, and I wouldn’t say they felt any better, but they felt okay enough to continue through my working sets. The weight felt unreasonably heavy, and my legs felt extremely heavy and slow. They felt strong, but slow.
The actual working sets felt a little better, but the bar still felt heavy. They were certainly not easy or explosive, but the lifts felt manageable. That’s all I could hope for on a day like today.
My final AMRAP set was three plus reps at a heavy weight for me, two hundred and eighty pounds. The bar just felt crushing on my shoulders from the weight, but I have to admit that the squats actually felt fairly easy considering how heavy the weight was. I stopped at the third rep because my legs were feeling so much like dead weight, but I feel like on a good day I had a couple of more reps in me. Not today, though. They looked good.
I was thrilled with today’s squats, though. I repped out the heavy weight that I could only hope to get for a single a few years ago. Today I did those squats on a bad day for me, too! Not every day is going to feel and go great, but today I got the work done. The toughness of today, both mentally and physically, made it even more rewarding to me.
Today’s music was Alkaloid