Training My Posterior.

If you’re wondering, i’m talking about training my posterior chain – not my bum !

Third cycle changes : time to add an exercise – for the TLDR that’s in the form of Deadlifts.

With reference to the blog thread covering my major push towards health and physical function i’m well into my second cycle of dietary and exercise changes ; as I hoped iv’e mostly settled in, as a habit. to the changes I put in place at the beginning of this cycle and i’m generally happy with progress except that I had and still have a nagging doubt that my exercise is effective as it could be.

Maybe not in this cycle although I have one more significant exercise in mind for this one, I intend to move towards a more total exercise regime in terms of major muscle groups exercised regularly. What i’m setting up and slowly getting used to again is what used to be my strongest exercise – what’s known as the deadlift. This used to be my favorite exercise of all during the time I trained with free weights in the gym. Someone that watched me train predicted (correctly) that my deadlift would develop nicely while my squats and pull-ups would lag behind even though I worked on both. His reasoning was that I had exceptionally long limbs on a relatively short back – in brief I look a bit like an ape !

The other thing that I should work on but which i’m leaving to future Steve – actually next cycle Steve – is some form of upper body exercise such as push-ups which I always used to dislike but which I carried on with when I left that gym : my work practice in my last, part time, job was to try and do my fifty before the working day started and that was on the floor of our recovery unit before anyone else turned up : I also had a way of doing plank pull-ups using a broomstick handle laid across two clinical patient trolleys.

I modified our back garden deck during the Covid 19 enforced lockdown – what a shitshow that was ? – such that I had a home made squat rack made up from 2″ x 4″ timbers made up into a T girder and a pair of notched plywood plates to support the barbell. This year, in my post stroke state, I was thinking about taking the whole thing apart and offering my barbell and plates to anyone that would come and carry them away but then I thought to modify my set up to allow me to do what we used to call ‘heavy partials’ – having the barbell supported off the floor slightly to reduce the load early on in the movement.

If you’re wondering I used to do my deadlifts straight from the deck, with the ground clearance to the bar set by half the diameter of a 20 Kg plate. In those days I could do a warm up set of 60 Kg and then add plates to the amount of % maximum I intended to work with that day – often around a round hundred Kg. Nowadays I don’t think I could get anywhere near that so iv’e set up the bar with a pair of 15 Kg plates and on stops several inches off of the deck – I will possibly reduce their height over time as my posterior chain firms up again – or so I hope. As I write i’m using my posterior chain far more than I have for several years – hence my current backache.

What i’m working on physically at the moment is creating an empty space in the back garden for my first large construction project – a cabin – and what i’m having to do is rake all of the stones off of a 10′ x 10′ space and from those seive all of the muck and organic debris : hence lots of back work.