The bug and the Windshield

There are two important lessons that one needs to know when training…

• You are going to have bad days in the gym, accept it.  Or as Kelsey would say, “Some days you’re the windshield and some days your bug… Today you were the bug.”

• If your bad days keep on occurring you need to fix your program.

Allow me to expand a little on these two points as I have recently come into contact with both during my training.  It’s vital that you listen to your body during your training in order to make the best gains you can.  To do this pay careful attention to how you feel during your main movements because this is going to be the marker for the rest of your workout.  Undoubtedly you will have a day where you feel like absolute crap which is perfectly FINE but you have to make the proper adjustments thereafter.

With me the times that I usually feel like this are during my deadlifts.  If you know me then you know that I absolutely HATE deadlifting, it’s the worst thing ever (I probably feel this way because I’m terrible at it, who knows).

Pulling had been going well though up until last Monday when I realized I had become the bug.  On that day everything felt heavy, I also felt out of my groove on every pull.  I worked up to 90% of my 1RM for a single and it was a griiiiiiind.  I tried to go down to 80% and get some quality work in but I didn’t even pull the weight off the ground, what happened next?  Well after I got my Wolverine rage on I calmed down and just nixed the rest of my pulls, went onto my squat variation got in some good sets and called it a day.  I simply chalked this up to being the bug and chose to just move on and look forward to the next training session.  These days can happen for just about any reason, tired, hungry, unfocused, and maybe even OVER TRAINED.  Don’t try and force it on these days, just get in whatever quality work you can and leave.  If you force it you will most likely make the problem that much worse and get hurt.

On to the second point, if these “bad” days keep occurring they are probably "bad" because you are OVER TRAINED and you need to fix the problem.  As I stated before I had a horrific time last Monday but this past Monday I was ready to go and felt pretty decent.  I worked up to 85% and pulled it for two singles with an alright bar speed.  I decided to put on 90% went to go pull and NOTHIN’!  I couldn’t even get the bar to budge at all.  I knew something was wrong because that shouldn’t have been happening.  Stevo convinced me to drop the weight, significantly, and just go for an easy double.  Well sadly that easy double was not easy at all.  I knew that I was pretty over trained and needed to fix something.  I called up “The Programmer” and told him what was going on, we talked about my training and my technique and came to the conclusion both needed to be fixed.  The answer ended up being that I won’t pull heavy again until my meet and when I do pull (probably once every two weeks now) it will be around 40-50% for singles just working strictly on form.  The take home message is don’t just ignore your body and keep going through a program simply because you feel you need to.  You will only get weaker and probably injure yourself doing that.  Reassess what you’re doing and make the adjustments needed so you can avoid your reps looking like this guy.

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