82.5kg weight class
- Squat 190/197.5/207.5 (PR)
- Bench 110/115/117.5x
- Deadlift 225/240/245x
My training for the meet:
This was my meet prep over the course of 11 weeks:
http://i.imgur.com/COn4A0H.png
I was on Texas Method so only the Intensity days (the days where I lift heavy) are shown. I pretty much planned all the numbers I was going to hit beforehand.
The bench numbers look funny because I used percentages, I just rounded up to the closest 2.5kg. I did 2 working sets for the bench which worked pretty well. If the first working set felt easy, I would add 2.5kg for the second working set (which I did pretty much every week, so in the last week I benched 105kg x 3, 107.5kg x 3 for example).
An observation from my previous training cycle for the squat was that I got really beaten up towards the end when I stuck with 5's throughout the training cycle, so this time I decided to switch to triples about 5 weeks out which worked well. I'm not making good progress with one working set on Intensity Day anymore so I think more adding more volume for my next meet prep will help me to continue to make progress..
For the deadlift I stuck with 2 sets of 4 reps throughout the cycle. This might have been a stupid thing to do seeing as I did worse on the deadlift at this meet compared to the previous one (although there was no squat in the last meet), so for the next cycle I plan to taper down the volume in the last 5 or so weeks.
Thoughts on the meet itself:
The squat felt strong. although I did lose the feel for heavy weights because of the deload week I took on the week of the meet. For my opener of 190 I didn't sit back enough so it felt a bit off. I got friends to cue me to sit back for my next 2 attempts which helped, they felt a lot better. It felt like I used a lot of back for my third attempt of 207.5kg but on the video it doesn't look too bad.
For the bench, people might be thinking why it didn't improve much. A possible explanation is that for my previous comp I did Smolov Jr for the bench, but I lost a lot of the strength I gained from Smolov Jr afterwards (for those unaware, the program involves benching 4 times a week for 3 weeks) because I didn't maintain the volume and frequency for the bench. For this training cycle I pretty much had to make back the strength that I lost but that being said though 115kg this time around felt stronger than the last 115kg I did.
I think the training approach I used for the bench works pretty well in the off-season when there's no competition to prepare for, but I'll be training the bench differently when preparing for my next competition (start out with lots of volume but taper it down over the weeks and gradually handle heavier weights).
For the deadlift, I think my crap performance was due to a combination of feeling tired on the day plus not being fully recovered from training. I really need to learn to back off in training early enough so that I can display my full strength on competition day. I won't make the same mistake again.
Video:
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