Week 4: Bench Press

This Bench Press day didn't go according to plan. There were a couple of moments of frustration, but I'm looking at it as a success, because I learned a couple of things and upon having a friend/fellow Powerlifter scrutinize my form - I feel confident that my overall technique is pretty damn good. He also pointed out to me what was wrong with my unracking technique. I taught myself how to unrack, no one ever corrected me. Basically, I was starting with the bar right over my eyes and doing a JM Press to unrack it. So, I shuffled a bit up the bench, to where my chest and elbows (flared out) were right underneath the bar. That made unracking a lot easier, but the bigger problem is how my arms are so long that it's quite a distance on my gym's benches to take the bar from rack to lockout. On the bright side, the racks at the meet are adjustable. Today, I tried out an ammonia inhalant pellet for the first time and it WOKE ME RIGHT UP! My sinuses immediately felt so clear and after grinding out a set of five with 215, I went on to blast my next set with the same weight with relative ease. It really felt like the bar was 20 pounds lighter. How odd that these are allowed in competition, but if I've had a cup of coffee in the past two days I'll fail the drug test and be disqualified... The reason that my set/rep scheme was so messed up today, is that I threw in a couple of singles to practice the commands... Well, the last set was a failure, but at least the two singles equaled out the total number of reps.

Enough rambling:

Bench Press:

Warmup Sets Barx8/95x5/135x3/185x1

Work Sets - 210x1/210x5/215x5/215x1/215x5/215x3

Chin-Ups - 5x5/5/4/3/2

Dips - 5x10/7/6/6/5x3

Inverted Rows - 4x8/8/6/10