Week 8, Day 1

Clean and jerk: (2+1)RM
Back squat: 3RM
Push-press (behind): 3RM

Piper has been working hard and making some HUGE gains this cycle!

I don't remember where exactly it was, but recently I read a nicely worded statement about training that went something like "you don't get stronger by doing hard workouts, you get stronger by recovering from hard workouts". This is a really nice way of summarizing the way the body adapts to training to make us stronger and achieve our goals, and the principles of adaptation upon which a lot of our training is designed. Sure, if we don't ever train hard, we won't have anything to recover from, and the body won't adapt and get stronger. You don't get stronger by NOT lifting weights. But on the flipside, if all you ever do is beat yourself into submission without giving your body a chance to recover, it'll be hard to make much progress.

We've been beating ourselves up pretty good over the past few weeks (especially last week), and it's time once again to let ourselves recover a little bit so that we can get stronger and attack the next three weeks with the same intensity we have been. Yes, that means that it's time for a "deloading" or "low volume" week. This week is intended to be super low volume. That means no back-off sets, and getting to "heavy for the day" efficiently and moving on when you feel like you've hit it. The goal this week should be no (or minimal) misses, ESPECIALLY on the squats. Squat misses are extremely taxing, and we want to avoid those in general so that we can continue to hit it hard week after week, but we especially want to avoid them this week so that we can recover from all the taxing training over the past few weeks.

This week especially, we want to remember that "RM" just means "heavy for the day". I'm not worried about adding weight from last week on anything. If you're feeling it, then great don't hold yourself back, but if you're not then there's nothing wrong with hitting something even a little lighter than last week. Do what you can, and move on. We are going to be trying to add weight every week for the next three weeks, so there will be plenty of time to hit big triples/doubles/singles!