Tuesday's and Thursday's sessions were poop bucket sessions. I got all my reps but everything felt like shit. Wednesday was OK but nothing special whatsoever. That's the ebb and flow of training. Some sessions you feel like you could lift the world and other days you'd rather be watching the death scene of your beloved childhood pet on an endless loop instead of training. That's what Thursday felt like.
Saturday was better. These days are geared towards getting me ready for the 500 x 29 day which will probably happen on my birthday. At the end I added up the total pounds dead lifted and it came to 14,350. 500 x 29 = 14,500. This got me thinking about the concept of total volume which is weight x reps. In my mind volume always needs to be looked at within the context of intensity.
Intensity is represented as a percentage of your 1RM and can be different from day to day. After my first rep at 500 I estimated my 1RM to be about 540-550 even though I've pulled 565 in the past few weeks. Today 565 would've stayed right where it was.
So back to intensity. If we take 540 as my 1RM, on Saturday I pulled 4,000 pounds at a 93% intensity, 5,100 pounds at a 78%, and 5250 pounds at a 65% intensity. Buuuuut it's not that simple. By the time I got to the third and fourth reps at 500 that 1RM felt like it could have crept back into the 565 range. And by the last rep at 500 that was about all I had in the tank. So what does that say about intensity? Was 500 93%, 90%, or 100%. It was all of them. Intensity is a sliding scale and one that is more about feel than anything.
Lately I've been ramping up to a daily 1RM before I do rep work at lighter weights. This daily max is lower than my 1RM and is a weight I feel confident hitting any day of the week regardless of where my recovery is at. This number and my work sets after it are not picked using percentages of my 1RM. They are based almost entirely on feel. How does the weight feel in my hands or on my back? How have all of my warm up sets felt? Do I need to poop or will I be safe? This is how I pick a lot of my weights and how I pick a lot the weights for most of my clients. I pay attention to body language and speed of the movements.
What I'm trying to say is that weight training is not a math assignment. Percentages certainly have their place- in my case I use them with my weaker lifts- and are extremely useful when training large numbers of people. But the whole point of the thing is to improve your body. Listening to what your body is telling you and deciding the best course of action is part of that improvement. Keep things simple, pay attention, get better as time goes on.
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