lifting_heavy_things | NRoLfW: Finished stage 3!

After my unlucky timing which made stage 2 last forever, stage 3 went smoothly. I wish I could have had someone to watch my form, though: I had doubts.

Has any of you doing this program managed to use more than 1 kg (2.2 lbs) on the YTWL? I barely managed 2 kg on the Y and the T once, but my shoulders argued that this was not a good idea, and I let them have their way.

Also, four workouts was too short to get the planks or the Body Weight Matrix even close to the time/repetitions in the plan. Anyone having more success with those? What's your secret?

I ruled on the back extensions, though.

One-armed dumbbell snatch (loved those!): 12 kg (26 lbs)

Dumbbell single leg Romanian deadlift (form was fine, balance, less so): 2x16kg (2x35 lbs)

Barbell bent-over row (very unsure about form here): 35 kg (77 lbs)

Dumbbell single-arm overhead squat (ouch): 6/12 kg (13/23 lbs)

Dumbbell incline bench press: 2x10kg (2x22 lbs)

Reverse wood chop: 10 kg (22 lbs)

Best time on planks set: 85 sec, 62 sec, 56 sec

Barbell Romanian deadlift/bent-over row (again, form tricky): 35 kg (77 lbs)

Partial single leg squat (too lazy to put up a box every time, did pistol squats, but only partial, limiting was range of motion, not weights): 2x12 kg (2x26 lbs)

Wide-grip lat pulldown: 40 kg(88 lbs)

Back extension: 20 kg (44 lbs) dumbbell. Limiting was grip strength, but I'm making progress there.

YTWL: 2x1kg (2x2.2 lbs)

Swiss ball crunch my form sucked, I went back to a 5kg weight held on top of my head. My back hated the lateral flexations, and I feel I did the incline reverse crunches very wrong: most work was done by my arms, and they made my back hurt, too. I returned to Prone Jackknifes, though those weren't much of a challenge.

Body weight matrix I managed two sets of 12/2x6/2x6/12 reps barely.
Intervalls I did running (I bicyle about 100 km a week I cannot cycle slowly), got up to 12 kph (7.5 mph), which for me is very good.

The prone cobra went a lot better than expected, I could have done it longer than 90 seconds.

When this comes up again in stage 5, maybe I'll gather my courage and ask one of the trainers, or I'll do a lot of warm-ups with little weight. Anyway, vacation coming up!

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I've been using 5lb dumbbells on the YTWLs, though I don't have an incline bench so I'm leaning on a Swiss ball, and it might be affecting my range of motion in ways that let me lift more. (For reference, your lifts on pretty much everything else are better than mine are, and I'm doing the four reps for stage five rather than the six reps for stage three, so I can't be stronger than you are overall. Though I did better on the body-weight matrix, so possibly my endurance is better?)

For planks -- I guess I started out doing them for a minute with little problem because my mother had started doing yoga and showed me planks and I could suffer for a minute right away, so after doing them for a minute at the ends of workouts for several weeks I could suffer through 90 seconds. So I guess I didn't take four workouts to get there -- I just got better at them doing stage one and two. When I looked ahead and went 'ha ha no two minutes' I took my 90 seconds and added five. Then I tried adding ten. Fifteen seconds feels like a big jump, but five feels more manageable. Even adding a second or two would work -- if you hold the plank for a second longer every set and do three sets each workout, then by the end of the four workouts you've added twelve seconds, which is three seconds short of fifteen, so you just need to tough it out for three more seconds to finish out the jump from 60 to 90 or from 90 to 120.

For hip extensions I started doing hip thrusts -- I've been doing them with my feet raised, and using a dumbbell rather than a barbell. I've been thinking that I should be doing them with a barbell since recently I had to push with my arms to keep the dumbbell from rolling off my hips, and this probably affects how much weight I'm lifting with my hips.

Though I did better on the body-weight matrix, so possibly my endurance is better?)

Probably. My endurance is a mess in that overlap between strength and stamina that can neither be done as aerobic exercise (enough air for chatting) nor as pure burst of energy.

I feel like blaming the issues in my right shoulder (which aocounts for most of the ouch on the db single arm overhead squat, too), but I can't do the YTWL with 2 kg in my left hand, either. It feels like attempting to access something that just isn't there, range of motion goes from about 80° to about 30... maybe I can improvise half-pound weights to add.

hip thrusts

Wow. I have to try that.

What have you been doing to get through the matrix? I found that what helped me was to break it into the sections and rest as needed -- get through 24 squats, rest, do 12 lunges, rest, do 12 jump lunges, rest, do 24 jump squats. And if you can't do an entire section in one go, rest in the middle of that too -- I started out being able to get through everything but the jump squats (with resting in between) and I'd break the jump squats into 10-10-4, and then 12-12. And then every time I did them, I tried to rest less. So I do the whole thing, it just takes a while. I needed a fair bit of rest when I started, but I was happy to discover that when I started stage 5, I managed to get through almost the entire thing without stopping more than a second or two to shake out my legs. Until I got to the jump squats, which continued to kick my ass and I still had to rest before starting them (I tried going straight in and died after two) and also still split them up and rested in the middle of them. But there was less resting, and some day I will be able to do 24 jump squats without resting in the middle. One of these days I'm going to have to see if I can do 24 jump squats in a row when I haven't been lifting weights for an hour and a half, because if I can't manage that when I'm not tired, I'm pretty doomed. ::g::

I think lat raises and things similar to lat raises are just really hard. When I was looking for YouTube videos of the YTWL exercise because I didn't have the NRoLfW book on hand, I kept finding videos of huge burly guys doing them with light weights. I can just barely manage with the 5lb weights. And I'm not sure how my form is, if the Swiss ball is lifting me too high and making this easier than it should be, or if I should be getting a greater range of motion and really should be lifting a bit less.

I don't remember what I was looking for that made me find people doing hip thrusts with weights, but they made me want to try them too. I tried doing the hip thrusts with the barbell today and I need to get bigger, heavier plates. Not because the weight was too light, though I could probably lift more than I'm doing, but because I want more space to get my hips under the bar -- the ten pound plates don't lift it high enough and I have to do uncomfortable contortions to get it in place.

What have you been doing to get through the matrix?

First did only 1/4, then 1/3, then 1/2, stopped to catch my breath for a few seconds when I just couldn't go on anymore (usually after the jumping lunges), then continued. The jump squats are less bad then the lunge jumps for me.

Thinking about it, pacing myself better might be a good idea. It's one of those ideas that never come naturally to me... :-S

I have done the YWTL on the inclined bench press bench, because the normal benches are too short. It's about 30°.

Regarding the hip thrusts and the height of the bar, could you put plates or low boxes or steps under the plates on the bar? I doubt I could wiggle under the bar even using 10kg plates. OTOH, when brawling (playfully) I have successfully bucked 70 kg with that motion a few times... But people have a higher centre of weight than barbells. And if they land somewhere they shouldn't, they are at least soft. ;-)

NRoLfW: Finished stage 3!

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