Road to Nationals Week 2

This week started off awesome, ordered up a new bells of steel powerlifting bar that is IPF spec and a great price point. The gym I work out at has three Olympic barbells, two are 30mm and one is 28mm in circumference. Competition bars are 29mm and believe me that 1mm makes a huge difference if you want to try out the hook grip. Once I have the new bar, I'm going to take another shot at getting used to using the hook grip on my heavy deadlifts. Either way this was THE barbell I wanted for our home gym eventually and I'll drag it to the gym for deadlift days. This is the company I'm eventually also going to purchase our home gym power rack from. The best prices for WHAT you get that I can find in Canada.
bellsofsteel.com

Day 1 Shoulders
I changed the main exercise up on this one from seated DB presses to seated smith machine military press. Same rep scheme nothing different but I found this exercise hit the front deltoids far better than the previous one. Weight for the close bench press feet up increased 20 lbs from last week which I had no problem working with. Added in a superset of medium grip pullups while I did the warm up and work sets for the close grip bench press. I had no time while doing my BBB sets on the smith machine because I only rested 45 seconds max between these sets. Finished with more upper back work which consisted of one arm DB rows and 20 mins of interval on the treadmill.
If I compare the amount of shoulder DOMS between seated DB press and seated SM military press, the SM version wins hands down. It's a keeper for now.

Day 2 Squat
Of all my lifts squat has been the one I cared the least about and in order to add more weight to the bar I will need to spend some time on refining this lift. Reading articles about different ways to squat can be very confusing. Again I always fall back to a easy to remember and apply method. Trying to complicate a lift just turns it into a cluster fuck. Dig this part of your foot into the floor , do this , do that and the list goes on and on. Up to this point I was squatting with a low bar style and a narrow  stance. Much like my sumo deadlift I wanted an easy 5 to 6 step process to execute the lift. In today's workout during my warm up sets I worked on filming from the side each set. I worked on increasing my stance slightly wider and did all my heavy work sets with a wider stance. My lower back did not like it but with time my strength and lower back will get better as I dial in my technique. The main 3 points because I squat without a belt is my breathing technique, keeping my spine in a neutral position and keeping tension throughout the entire lift. Once I moved to my BBB sets it was just more squatting and using each rep to concentrate on my lifting technique. My main issue with the wider stance was loosing tension in my lower back at the very bottom of the squat. VERY bad so I had to really concentrate on keeping tight all the way down and up.
After all the squatting next up was my fav RDL's with higher reps. Increased the weight from last week by 10 lbs on my last two sets and was feeling the burn on my hammies. Last up was front squats on the smith machine and like normal this sucked. I was done like dinner by the end of this workout.

Day 3 Bench Press
Oh this one left a mark the day after in the form of muscle soreness!! Increased the weight in all my exercises so this workout had me breathing at times like I just did an all out sprint. The combo that did this was feet up CAT style bench press 10 reps 10 secs rest then a set of bent over rows for 10 reps repeated for 5 sets. Heaviest set for my 5's Pro bench was 280lbs x 5 with my feet up at 9RPE.

Day 4 Deadlift
Busy busy at the gym so I ended up ditching the hex bar and splitting my deadlift sets between pulling conventional and sumo. Still not going with heavy weights or lower reps with the deadlift. Sticking to my plan and keeping the 5 sets of 10 reps with 4 of these sets at 315lbs and 1 set at 275lbs. Kept a deliberate pace crushing each rep off the floor and then lowering it under moderate control reset, repeat for 10 reps. Sounds easy but once you up the weight and slow everything down instead of cranking of a quick 10 reps makes a huge difference. This is also my secondary leg day so I finished up with some pin squats below parallel. Stuck with keeping my stance wider (shoulder width) and keeping tight throughout the entire range of motion. Actually felt real good doing 3 sets of 5 reps at 285lbs.

Day 5 Arms Race
This workout just gets harder each time because I'm able to handle slightly more weight or keeping the same weight farther into the workout before I have to lower it. But I love it. One more of these workouts then I'll be changing this one up.

Second week is done and I'm real happy with how this program is going for me so far. Increased the weights for all my exercises keeping the same amount of sets and reps. Next week everything goes up in weight one more time! The only change will be once I get the new deadlift bar. Going to add in the 5's progressive and keep either all or cut some of the 10 rep sets after for the deadlift.
One day off and then Saturday it all starts over with shoulders on tap.
Keep it strong gym rats!!