AndyJ's Body Enhancement Thread

Monday’s workout got pushed to Tuesday, and Wednesday’s workout got pushed to today. (Friday)

3-1/2 hours, though two of that was rests between sets and general time-wasting.

Squats first, then benches, then deadlifts. The shoulder-popping on the benches was more of a dull thump today; uncomfortable, but not as painful as usual. My right knee usually complains about deadlifts, and I gimp around for a while afterward. No problem today. Squats weren’t as painful as usual either. My "stay at a fixed weight and work on the joint issues" plan seems to be working.

I haven’t been able to to overhead presses at all; the right shoulder would grind to a stop just above the "Mussolini salute" angle. So it was on Tuesay. Today I shoved my piece of 1" PVC pipe up, and it went cleanly overhead, no shoulder commotion at all. I did a couple sets of 10 to make sure, then moved to the light barbell with 35 pounds on it. Just a small amount of popping, not enough to stop me from doing the presses. Yay!

I did some shoulder stretching exercises; that’s putting the PVC pipe against the front of the cage, leaning into it, and forcing my shoulders to rotate back. That’s more of a dull pain than a shooting pain now. At the moment my "overhead presses" come to a stop about ten degrees from straight up, and I can’t even get close to a proper behind-the-head lockout yet. But progress is good, and I can still press, even if it’s abysmal form.

Curls are split between an EZ-bar, Zottman curls, and concentration curls, since they work the muscles slightly different. The tendonitis in my right elbow doesn’t even notice Zottman curls for some reason. EZ-bar curls make it twinge, and it doesn’t like concentration curls at all. So I’m doing mostly Zottmans and some short sets of EZ-bar and concentration, trying to strengthen the tendon and attachment without causing inflammation like I got last year.

My knees are handling the bicycle better, but I still have minor pain for a couple of days after a ride. It’s getting better, so it’s probably more of a bone-spur issue than a fucked-joint issue.

I dropped from squatting three days per week to two days, replacing one say with split squats as a mobility exercise. The split squats weren’t nearly as painful as I anticipated. However, dropping one day of squats turned the bar from "feels easy enough, could probably add ten pounds" to "holy shit, I might have to bail out before I get it back up."

Since the split squats don’t seem to be interfering with regular squats, I’m going back to three days a week, plus the split squats.

I haven’t walked the lake trails in about a month. I had to go in at 0500 this morning to do some maintenance at a client site; on the way back I walked one of the trails. Before, I wouldn’t even notice any knee pain. This time, it didn’t exactly hurt, but my knees weren’t happy. So, it looks like another thing that I have to keep up with regularly.

That lake usually has posses of Tactical Assault Ducks staking out their turf on the paved trail. This is the first time I’ve not seen any ducks. Instead, there was a single swan sitting on a tree stump out in the lake. Did the swan run all the ducks off? There were plenty of ducks along the Riverfront Trail last weekend.

The heavier pumping schedule seems to be working okay. I decided to put up with a small amount of edema and see if pushing "time in tube" would help.

TL;DR: yes. I haven’t measured, but flaccid is noticeably better.

My use of the heating pad when pumping was intermittent since I usually got edema, even when backed down to 104F with the controller. But that was at my usual 30-minute pump time. I split that into two 15s, 10 or 15 minutes apart. No edema. After a while I tried three 15s, with slight edema. I got acclimated to that, and now I can run four 15s with no edema.

That may be the limit, given available time.

TL;DR #2: instead of just Time vs. Vacuum, it’s Time vs. Vacuum vs. Heat.

I’ve been doing some more bicycling. I’m up to 15 miles now on the recumbent trike.

My flaccid was very good this morning - almost 5 inches. Normally it’s closer to 4. And I’ve had some success with pumping to make my balls bigger. I think it’s coming along very well.

Downside: when on the bike, I’m always aware of my new, improved "wedding tackle". The leg motion works my flaccid and balls around in my underwear. Not quite enough to get chafed. Yet, anyway.

I used my new trap bar with yesterday’s workout. Trap bar deadlifts are definitely different than straight bar deadlifts.

Every workout day I alternate deadlift types; standard, Romanian, and now trap bar. Like alternating types of curls, I’m trying to hit slightly different muscle groups for improved mobility.

Mark Rippetoe did a hate video on trap bars. His main point was that the loaded bar can swing, there’s not much you can do about it, and you could fall or hurt your back. Which sounded valid, except the military and many schools have abandoned straight bar deadlifts for trap bars and there doesn’t seem to be a flood of injured lifters.

I may go over to Rippetoe’s forum and suggest that the best way to correct the swing on the trap bar would be to use it with a Smith machine. Since Rippetoe loooves the Smith machines, the reaction might be entertaining.

I like using a trap bar, have used one for many years with no issues. I was never fond of scraping my shins regardless of the manliness or badge of honor it may bestow. Just make sure you center yourself and the weight is lined up with the middle of your foot, or at least real close.
I’ll use a straight bar when doing SLDLs, which I’m considering starting.

I’ve heard Rip hated on them due to what you mention but I’ve never had one swing on me. I’ve pulled over 300# with no swing and warm up with 145# with no swing, so I don’t think the weight is the issue, it’s the lifter.
So two words in that regard - Pay Attention.

A trap bar seems to be a bit less stressful on my lower back as well and keep in mind when doing DLs, form changes (ass higher/lower, forward lean, head up, etc) can hit different areas harder from your quads, glutes to hamstrings so keep consistency with however you do it.

I think you should let them in on this new found methodology.

It took me a while to master the deadlift; after orthopedic surgery years ago, my left knee intensely dislikes anything touching it, and the bar tends to do that while coming up. And I didn’t care for the bar dragging along my shins, either.

For the pitiful weight I lift, I can keep the bar from touching my leg on the way up and down, though it’s bad form. None of that is an issue with the trap bar.

I read where some people cut up 2-liter soda bottles to make shin guards, which sounded like a nifty idea, but a pain in the ass to lace on with paracord or shoelaces. Looking around, I found some Kevlar chaps designed for guys who use chainsaws. They looked like just the ticket, protecting all the way up to mid-thigh, but I never tried them.

My reasoning is, if you don’t have to use a specific form to meet competition rules, alternating variations of a lift works slightly different muscle groups, which is a good thing. I already know from experience that plain deadlifts, RDLs, and trap deadlifts all stress different parts of my body.

Agreed.

Ideally, a call-in to his podcast-thing, so we could see his expressions. But he’d probably suspect he was being trolled.

I’ve been doing lots of reps with light weight, working the crunchiness out my my joints, for the last several months.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve started adding a bit of weight.

The report from the rheumatologist came in this morning’s mail. I just finished entering everything into my lab spreadsheet. There were a bunch of tests I’ve never had before. The notes and summary were interesting.

Some overlapping boilerplate text there, but basically, no inflammatory arthritis; just fucked knees and lots of bone spurs everywhere, aggravated by exercise. Note I *did* have inflammatory arthritis before I went to strict keto; I reported on that a year or two ago.

He doesn’t see anything wrong with my back, but by modern standards of "fat old dude who sits at a keyboard all day", I guess what used to be considered a spinal kyphosis problem is "the new normal."

I’ll have to write back and ask for the X-ray files again.

Trap bar deadlifts today. I wound up adding another ten pounds.

I’ll do regular deadlifts next Monday, and Romanian deadlifts Wednesday, before I do the trap bar again.

The trap bar feels *really* easy at the same weight. There’s no stress on my lower back at all. The stress isn’t a problem, but I have to watch my form and I definitely know I’ve been deadlifting afterward. Also, my knees seem to be happier with the trap bar. I just squat down and stand straight up instead of having the bar in front of me.

Most of the weightlifting sites mention the trap bar "works slightly different muscles" than a regular deadlift, but it feels like a whole different lift to me.

Since my lower back isn’t getting a workout, I’m going to add some bent-over rows next week.

Mrs. Andy wanted some stuff from the store yesterday morning, so I took the recumbent bicycle to town to get it. I hadn’t ridden it for a while and my knees were complaining, so I skipped squats yesterday. This morning I was back out at 0700 due to guilt.

I finally made some use of my new landmine attachment, doing some one-arm "landmine rainbows" with the bare bar. Crunch-crackle-pop! Looks like I found another collection of bone spurs to work on. The funny thing is, I never realize they’re there until I try to move a joint in some path I seldom use. Maybe it’s a case of "Doctor, it hurts when I do that."

I didn’t notice that the instructions said to use both arms. I tried that, and it’s a whole different exercise with two arms - my lower back noticed the twisting, while my shoulders were unaffected.

I also got some partial (legs supported) monkey hangs in today. The right shoulder complained, but I managed three sets of 10 seconds. I’ll work up from that, now. Last year I could hold my whole body weight, but the bone spurs grew back when I stopped doing hangs over the winter.

My opinion is the trap bar may be a bit easier to pull with instead of a straight bar, mechanics factor into it since your shins, knees and thighs are in the path of the straight bar. Obviously with the trap bar, all these are not an issue.

You may have noticed but you can make TBDLs more like a squat movement if you keep your ass down and your head up which would put more stress on your quads. I have a tendency to wander a bit with this when I’m deadlifting. My back is always straight but I don’t always stay consistent with how deep I go and how much a lean. I feel it in one place or the other the next day.

For your lower back you could add one more version of deadlifts - stiff legged deadlifts. You could use the trap bar for those as well.
Stiff legged doesn’t necessarily mean keeping your knees locked out.
It’s a good movement for all things posterior - lower back, glutes and hamstrings.

For me, bent over rows always stressed my lower back but not in a good way. Unless maybe using DBs which seems to remove all stress from my lower back.

I haven’t done any twisting with the landmine, too worried about my whiny shoulder.
Monkey hangs kinda did the same with my shoulders if I relaxed too much when doing them.

There’s a lot you do with that landmine attachment if you want to dig into it.

I might try that.

Yep. A bunch of stuff is more like "if you only had a landmine, you could fake it like this…", but it’s pretty nice for hitting different shoulder groups. It would probably have been useful for landmine squats, back when I was having so much trouble with real squats.

For being cheap and taking very little space, the landmine attachment is turning out to be a good value.

Two years ago I bought a used barbell and weight bench. It was one of those 35-pound 3-piece Cap barbells. The guy I bought it from put it in the back of my truck. I got home, and I couldn’t pick it up. I had to slide it off the tailgate and drag it into the house by one end.

Every now and then I get annoyed that I’m not where I want to be, and then I have to stop and think back to where I started.

Patience grasshopper.
Everybody is that way.

You’ve made some impressive progress regardless, based off what you’ve posted.