Last week I went out of town to visit a friend and attend a conference in DC. Lots of walking and biking in th eintense heat. Felt pretty good except the raw crotch from cycling in the wrong undies. First or second day there, I attempted a few parallel grip pullups on my friend's bar. The good is that I got 95% up on a complete pull up. The bad is that on the way down I fought too hard and felt intense pain in my left triceps. This was 3 weeks out. The next day after cycling the pain was pretty bad. Swelling back. Injury basically reset I guess.
This drastically limits my ability to lift. Having deadlifts as the only option isn't terrible though, it's not like I'm reduced to nothing but curls. I hit a workout at a gym called Mint in Adams Morgan on Thursday, and that was interesting. More spa and yoga den than gym, people were literally walking over to watch me deadlift - while I was only warming up. Like an animal in a zoo, I had a small audience while I deadlifted 465 and did 500lb shrugs. It was ridiculous. I got out as fast as I could.
Saturday at 8AM I wake up to my phone buzzing, wife informing me that my father in law died. I flew back and spend the next 5 days in the Beaumont area (where we are originally from), dealing with all that. Was a horrible week. Got home late last night and had my first proper night's rest in nearly a week.
Today, getting back into my usual gym, the 24hr Fitness SS near my house, it felt like such a great gym by comparison. Funny how that works. Did some deadlifts, shrugs, and high pulls. Ran out of gas pretty early but struggled through it. The deadlifts felt really clean and solid and I set some rep PRs.
This leads me to the following: I'm going to be on, more or less, a deadlift only program for the next 4-6 weeks. I can't really do any rows for a while and in any case can't do heavy pull downs, etc, so doing a 10 week Coan cycle is out. I've got an idea of a program, doing my own thing, that I think should work. I'll go something like what I did today - based on my recent 1RM test, day 1 is work up to a single at 90%, then max reps at 80% then max reps at 70%, followed by a similar template on shrugs with no warmups. I will probably move the high pulls to the start of the session in the future. I will alternate this with a volume / speed day, working at 60%. Each workout, I'll go up 5lbs on the lifts. That's basically 1% per week. If I do this for 6 weeks, that's a theoretical 6% or 30lb bump on my deadlift, and that's easily testable.