Training Log: Entry 2683

YESTERDAYS LUNCHTIME WORKOUT

Buffalo bar Squats
5xBar
5x140
3x230
1x320
1x370
9*x410 with a crunch

Notes: I have some video of this that I'll upload later, but I was coming up from the bottom of the 9th rep when suddenly my left inner thigh muscle/groin basically collapsed on itself.  I had initially thought I had re-injured my hamstring, but it turned out to be the groin muscles which have been bugging me for about a month now.  Most times, when I train through the pain my body adapts, but this time it won.

What sucked was that I was rushing this workout already so I could get to work, so I had enough time to fall down on the floor, do a quick assessment of the damage, put the weights and bar away, ice it for 15 minutes, grab a show and go sit at a desk for 8 hours, which was about the worst thing possible.  I still did my best to get up and move around frequently, and I kept forcing my body to move through the painful parts of the ROM so that I wouldn't get totally locked down.

I'm fairly certain what I've done is muscular rather than connective tissue, as I CAN move through all parts of the ROM, just with significant pain.  I'm very swollen at the moment but no bruising so far, but that may come in a few days like it did with the hamstring.


Injuries don't tend to upset me, as I usually earn them, but I'm a little miffed about this one because rep 9 isn't where I struggle on this particular squat workout.  Were it on rep 12 or 13 and I was grinding it out this would have been completely acceptable, but this being on rep 9 makes it seem super flukey.

The things I have to acknowledge: I am very lean (for me) right now, and that is always when I get hurt.  In about a month I've blown out the hamstring and the groin (and as an aside, I also hurt the left side of my abs from this, most likely as a result of collapsing with 410lbs on my back).  When I blew out my ACL, I was also very lean.  The correlation is clear.  With no competitions coming up in the future and, quite frankly, me possibly just plain no longer caring about competing in strongman, I most likely need to start getting smart about my training.  The solution is most likely going to be about making light weight feel heavy, at least for the most immediate way forward.  I know that I have the ability to rapidly adapt to heavy loads when the time comes, and that should be what an intensification cycle is for.

For the immediate immediate future, my squat ROM is very small right now, so lower body training may boil down to very short ROM trap bar work for stupidly high reps and some manner of box squatting.  Hatfield squats may appear on the menu, as that was effectively how I was squatting at work to get through the ROM.

I'm going to go back to what I was doing before as far as structuring my programming by book-ending my lower body workouts (so go squat-bench-press-dead-bench-press-squat), giving me longer to recover between heavy lower body workouts. 

I don't see too much impact on my upper body workouts for the way forward.  Might have to limit log work on the pressing, since cleaning it will suck.