It was a good day at the gym today. Everyone that came in was feeling good and putting out a great effort. I even got a session in at IFAST.
I’ve been working on some foundational things like developing my cardiac system and my ability to produce energy locally in the muscles as well as addressing some mobility issues in my hips. This is the kind of work that really isn’t much fun, but it will set me up for the more intensive training to come later. It screws with your head a bit because, as you’ll see some of this programming is easy from an effort standpoint, but it can challenge your mental toughness.
Sled drags warm-up
followed with lower body mobility
Subjective readiness: 7/10
forgot my heart rate monitor
Safety squat bar (SSB) step-ups to just >=90 degrees
95 x 6, 135 x 3 x 6
SSB Squat to box just below parallel
225 x 6, 275 x 6, 305 x 6
SSB Tempo squats
135 x 30 sec x 3 on 60 sec rest
SSB deep quad dominant split squat
135 x 2 x 5
Sub jective level of effort 7/10
3 hours later 30 min of LISS aerobic work at 120 bpm. This is to ultimately improve recovery and I’ll be doing it more frequently. Intensity is so low that it won’t impact any other aspect of programming, but I’m expecting to see some improvement in sleep as I adapt. It is horribly boring, so I watched a bit of Ironman to occupy my brain.
All in all, not a bad session. Still felt challenged from an energy standpoint which brought my level of effort down to a 7/10. Nothing was to failure and I did’t really have any hip pain during training. It did stiffen up a bit after cooling off a bit.
Subjective readiness
Subjective readiness is a measure of how ready I feel for training after warming-up. It will vary depending on sleep patterns, stress (mental and physical), nutrition, state of recovery, etc. It’s a good measure to allow you to make programming changes on the fly. For instance, if you normally get 7 hours of sleep and wake at 6am, but last night you got 5 hours and woke at 5am, you may not feel as good and not as ready as you should be for an intensive training session. If you still rate your readiness at a lower than normal level (it varies depending on the person), you can effectively adjust your training for that day to prevent excessive loading that may slow or even halt progress.
I do recommend that you warm-up first as a little activity may actually improve your rating and level of readiness. I’d also track this measure before every training session to allow you to establish your own typical trends as to how your react to certain intensities and loads. I tend to use <5/10 as a cut-off for continuing with a regular session or just doing some light recovery work.
Ankle mobilization
A lot of coaches will use an active mobilization to improve ankle dorsiflexion as part of their preparation for training. I’ve had a bit of issue myself in my left ankle, but using Mulligan’s mobilization with movement techniques help quite a bit. Problem is that it’s damn awkward to try to mobilize your own ankle when a skilled practitioner is not around.
I was messing with a technique that I’ve recently started using on myself with a couple clients this morning. They had some rather significant improvements and were pretty pleased with the result. It was also quite easy for them to pick up the technique. I have no idea if anyone else has used this method before, so I’m going to create a video and pass it around to some people and have them test drive it themselves. If it goes well, I’ll try to post it for all to use themselves.
Have a great Independence Day!
Bill
