038 : 012 Strength Progression

Work:

• Front Squat; Build to a heavy set of 3 for the day with :04 active pause in the bottom position of each rep; do the pauses for ALL sets leading up to your top set. Aim for 4-6 total sets, not including warmups.

• Front Squat Oscillation; Find your sticking point from the above work. Oscillate up and down going no more than 2-3” above and below the sticking point. Making the range of motion you’ll work through only about 4-6”. This should take :15-:25 around 65-70% of the top weight lifted above. Maintain tension as you move and really explore this space. 

• Single Arm Dumbbell Bench Press; 4-5 sets of 6-8/arm at tempo :05 eccentric/explosive concentric; building as needed. If you cannot maintain tempo, the weight is too heavy.

• Strict Pull-up play; accumulate 10-15 total reps. Play around with tempo, pauses, mixed grips etc… put yourself in unnatural positions and find your weaknesses.

• Zottman Curl; 3 sets of 10-12/arm; treat this like you would CARs. Use this more to expose elbow joints to tension and pressure. Control your movements the entire time, don’t aim for loading, focus on tension.

Focus:

The purpose of these sessions right now is to create awareness around where you are weak throughout the range of motion, within each movement. Over time the goal is to create enough awareness that you know how to address your own weaknesses within the movements you perform. I’d like to run this block for 2-3 months as an experimental preparation phase for traditional strength training to follow. If we can make the system more robust as we address sticking points (aka weakness), then we can spend time addressing strength expression in a more safe and effective manner. While you work through this session, aim to make each movement as challenging as possible, pay attention, and start making your own assessments as to what YOU should work on.