Chris’ Training Log

January 3rd 2023

ME Upper

Today’s training had a very different feeling mentally for me. My typical meet schedule for the last couple of years has been a meet in the spring and one in the fall (typically around March and October). After my last meet this past October, I was in a weird rut where I probably wasn’t putting as much emphasis on my off-season training as I should have given the amount of issues that arose over the course of that prep cycle and found myself not really looking forward to training for another meet. So after discussing with Ben and my wife (who also competes), it was decided to hold off on doing a meet this spring. I have to be honest, I had a fair amount of anxiety around the decision until I committed to it.

Now that I have it feels like, no pun intended, a weight has been lifted off of me and training has become fun again. In that vein, tonight’s ME upper session was a total cheater ego day. Reverse gray band bench in the band shirt and my top set was 850. Being a poly bencher, albeit not a very good one, I’ve spent a fair amount of time playing with band shirts for some additional overload, triceps, and upper back work and I’m glad I made the progression with band shirts that I did. I started using a borrowed 2 ply Darkseid Vyper and am now using a borrowed 3 ply F8. The advantage being, the Darkseid felt easier to keep my elbows wide in order to properly stretch the chest plate at first and now I feel strong enough and comfortable enough in my technique to really leverage the F8. Basically, I no longer feel like the shirt is putting me where it wants to go, but I’m putting the shirt and the bar where I want them to go. I’m not done with poly by any means, but band shirts are a lot of fun to play with and I’ll end up doing a meet in one sooner or later.

Speaking of which, I do need to actually get off my ass and order a new poly shirt. The question being SDP or the new gray material from Overkill….

Follow up movements to this included a backdown AMRAP, behind the neck bamboo bar overhead presses, incline tate presses, barbell curls, cable flys, lateral raises, rear delt flys, tricep pushdowns, banded internal rotations, cable resisted trunk rotations, and reverse hypers. A lot of work, but these upper days always have me feeling great.