some pull-up progress

A great 8 hours of sound sleep. Weight: 177 1/4 lbs. Left quad still sore. I spoke to my chiropractor and he recommends moist hot (nuke a moist cloth in the u-wave) along rotated with ice. I have begun to walk up and down stairs sideways to keep the leg leg straight. But life is still real good .. in can focus on my pull-ups.

From a reference on the DD forum, I found another high volume pull-up plan called the "Armstrong Pullup Program". This is a very tough program to get one to 20RM in a month. There was one useful thing I will try. He recommends three sets of push-ups two hours in advance of any pull-ups. Instead of waiting two hours, I did three sub-maximal push-up sets with long rests before my pull-ups:

BW 3 x 8 Fighter Push-ups

Russian 3RM Fighter Pull-up Plan
Day 5: (Day 11 of plan) 5,4,3,2,1 with 2 mins rest between rungs

That 5th pull-up on the 1st set was slow but good form .. Graduation time! I just earned a day off and I can move onto the 5RM program. In all I went from a 2RM to 5RM in just under six weeks. Considering I started with the lowest volume program (Greg Donahue's) of one set of two pull-ups a day to today's 15 pull-ups over 12 minutes, I'm quite humbled by the power of these programs. There is also a real sense of ownership here as I had to tweak these programs to my particular needs.

I recently read on DD that Mike Johnson, RKC has had great success applying the Fighter Pull-up Rep Scheme to other lifts/exercises. As a result I applied it to two more exercise:

BW 5,5,4,3,2 Power Wheel Roll-out, Hold 3 secs and Back on knees
BW 8,7,6,5,4 Fighter Push-ups

I rested 2 minutes between all rungs. I love training like this as it takes all the guess work out and makes every rep count towards a goal.

Sir Rif has done it again. I was so inspired by his blog entry and his demonstration of will-training and tenacity, that I took all the adrenaline downstairs:

1. Double 32kgs 2 x 2 double cleans
2. 32kg 1 x 3 Right arm snatches.
3. 24kg 2 x 10/10 snatches

All three PRs. For 1. and 2. , I was never been able to do singles of either. For 3., a set of 1,2,3,4 ladders snatch ladders was my previous best with the 24kg. This is very encouraging as it provides more progress towards a yet to be planned future RKC Cert snatch test. Fortunately, my quad was oblivious to this (I hope). I almost did a 32kg snatch with my left but new well enough to quit while I was ahead.

I took a rest of several hours and decided to do some more snatches and enter Ssgt Adam Glass's 50,000 snatch challenge. My snatch form has really improved as these did not effect my quads ..in particular, I have been bending at the hips during the eccentric motion, not the the knees.

24kg 2 x 5/5/5/5 snatch
24kg 2 x 5/5 snatch
Double 16kg 1 x 10 snatch

Total snatch points = 116

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Diet and Nutrition Log

Breakfast:
1 bowl of Kitchari with sweet potato, Toor Dal and Green Gram Curry
2 cups of coffee with tbs of 1/2 and 1/2
4 oz Kefir
2 dates

Morning Snack:
2 small handfuls of roasted almonds
4 oz of Kefir

Lunch:
1 bowl of freshly made vegetarian split pea soup
1 bowl of Gujarati beans with Toor Dal and sweet potato
1 large naval orange


Dinner (out):
3 large handfuls of roasted salted peanuts
1 large shrimp fajita rice
1/3 salmon burger
1/2 glass of red wine