Friday

Well, the last full week of work before my first legitimate vacation since I started in my present job in early February is in the books.

I'm going in tomorrow and Monday to shut my portion of the lab down and will be back in Louisiana (hopefully) from Dec 22 to Dec 30. I haven't seen my older brother in 2 years now. Looks like we might overlap at the homestead from the 25th to about the 28th...and Doc 1% will be present for a few days as well. Little bro will be around for sure. Only bummer is that my sis and her husband will be in Guatemala for the duration of my stay. You win some, you lose some.

I'm feeling a bit back in normal sorts presently and was able to finish my 4th cycle of 5/3/1 in a decent manner.

I have not tested 1 rep maxes in awhile. But comparing rep maxes from Week 2 to Week 15 (I'll start on week 2 to throw out the first week as that was my first go round at finishing with rep maxes) we get the following:

Military Press: 103# --> 133# (29% increase)
Deadlift: 291# --> 332# (14% increase)
Bench Press: 215 --> 228# (7% increase)
Front Squat: 166# --> 204# (23% increase)

No surprise that the two lifts I trained the least prior to starting 5/3/1 went up the most in terms of percent. I have hit some higher rep max numbers in the deadlift, but I don't really believe them in light of how hard 5 @ 285 was for me this week and 8 @ 270 last week.

All in all I'm pretty pleased with the progress.

I'm going to shake things up over the next month and then I have another 4 month cycle of 5/3/1 planned. Not that anyone cares much (okay, JB and CES probably care), but I'll do a post with the current weekly plan, the transition, and the weekly plan for the winter/spring transition.