How to Over-train, Get Injured and Feel Like Crap, but Kill it on the Platform

• Tweet

November 2013, I sent an email to my coach:

 

“I can’t even tell you how today’s workout went, I’m too embarrassed. Needless to say, I sucked. What the hell’s happened, I was feeling awesome last week.”

And it was true. A week before I’d been feeling on top of the world. I’d just nailed a new set and rep PR for squats, my bench was strong, and my deadlift, despite rarely training it heavy, was going along great guns.

Then on the Saturday, I decided to re-test my one rep maxes, which resulted in the above email.

The workout was awful. The goal was to do a mock meet, with three attempts on each exercise. I went into it feeling a little apprehensive, but was pretty sure I’d pull through and do okay.

The previous week I’d hit 140kg for 4 sets of 4 on squats, so I went conservative on my first attempt.  For some reason, the 140 I slapped on the bar felt like 160 – it was slow, and an absolute grinder. I shrugged it off and went to 150, and nope, not a chance, I went down into the hole and didn’t come back up.  I decided to skip attempt three and move to the bench.

Bench has never been my strongest lift, but I still enjoy it. 100kg went on the bar for an “easy single,” but there was nothing easy about it. My ego took over and 110kg pinned me on my second attempt. I dropped back down to 105kg, and just about eeked out the lift, but with my butt almost a foot off the bench – there’s no doubt this would have been red lighted in a comp.

On to deadlifts. 190kg went up okay. I then pulled 200kg with a back so rounded it’d rival Quasimodo. The hitch when I reached knee-height looked like the most aggressive hump of a pitbull yet to be neutered and the vein in my temple was fit to burst. Again, I’d be laughed off the platform with form like that.

Usually I’d just see this as an off-day and move on. Trouble was, I was due to compete in  the GBPF South East championships in four weeks time. I should also add that an old hip flexor injury had decided to rear its ugly head a few weeks prior to this and my patellar tendon had become extremely tight seemingly overnight and for no apparent reason.

During my reminiscing time and a couple of hours of self-pity and loathing, the email from coach came back through –

 

“You’re over-reached. Don’t lose heart, we’ll pull you through this and you’ll come out stronger on the other side.”

 

That was the kick up the arse I needed. If my coach — a world record powerlifter and pro bodybuilder, had faith in me, I knew I could do this. We racked our brains to come up with a plan.

 

Planned Over-Reaching: Walking a Fine Line

Bouncing ideas off each other, we decided I was going to carry on over-reaching leading up to the meet.

The concept of over-reaching is a tricky one.

It sounds counterproductive at first – you deliberately expose your body to high levels of training stress, by raising volume, frequency, intensity, or a combination of all three. This results in feelings of fatigue and a drop in performance.

The idea, however, is that you experience super compensation, whereby resting after a short period of deliberate over-reaching results in an adaptation to this response, and you get a delayed boost in performance. Basically, you over-reach for a few weeks, take a week of downtime, then come back and notice a marked increase in performance for up to four or five weeks.

In essence, we were going to run me into the ground for three weeks, give me a week to recover, hope that I’d responded well, then go into the comp off one week of very light training.

Scary as shit, and not for the faint hearted.

 

The Plan

Here’s how I went about training from four weeks out until seven days before the meet

– Squat 3 times per week, bench 3 times per week and deadlift twice.

 

Squat:

– In every squat, I was to work up to a single that would feel roughly equivalent to a first or second attempt in a meet. This should be tough, but the most important thing was that I was not to miss a lift at all during this phase.

– In the first squat workout of the week I’d do the single, then 6 sets of 3 with 85% of that weight.

– In the second squat workout I’d do 5 sets of 5 with 80% of that day’s single.

– In the third squat workout I’d do 3 sets of 8 with 70% of that day’s single.

Bench:

– The structure for bench was exactly the same as for the squat, only the first workout of the week was 7 sets of 2 at 90% of the single, the second was 5 sets of 3 with 85% and the third was 3 sets of 5 with 80%. I usually squatted and benched in the same session.

 

Deadlift:

– I’d have two deadlift workouts per week. In the first I’d work up to a single again, then do 6 sets of 4 with 80% of that. The second workout wouldn’t have a max attempt, but would just be 4 sets of 6 with 75% of session one’s max.

I’d do this for three weeks, rest for a couple of days, then go back into the gym six days out from the meet and do 3 sets of 3 at 70% of my planned openers. At three days out I’d hit a single at 85% of my openers, and that would be it.

 

How’d it Feel? 

Like hell. The first week I was a broken man.

Guys in the gym thought I’d suddenly had my man card stolen from me and sprung a testosterone leak .My clients look at me in shock as I resembled a 90 year old man when passing them a kettlebell and even the prospect of warming up with an empty barbell took huge mental effort to get my butt in gear.

I finished the first week, and wondered how I was going to get through the next two, let alone lift heavier than this come meet day.

 

Something weird happened at the start of the second week though…….

 

My knee and hip flexor started to feel loads better. I’d initially accepted I was just going to have to train through pain and had resigned myself to a few weeks of limping round, but after one sports massage, the regular squatting seemed to have fixed the issue. My weights had been dropping toward the end of the first week, but they were holding steady and looking a lot smoother through week two.

 

Week three, I was on top of the world. Meet day couldn’t come soon enough. I took the decision not to push the weight too much on my singles on each lift, but they were all a piece of cake. I breezed through the drop down sets, and even decided to re-introduce my two weekly HIIT cardio sessions that I’d dropped due to fatigue in week one.

Despite this though, I was still nervous. I’d not hit anywhere near what I was hoping to get in the meet throughout this planned over-reaching cycle. Sure, I was feeling so much better, but I was unconvinced that such a draining, demanding training schedule was going to make me stronger for the comp.

I did the deload week, then sat back and hoped for the best.

 

Meet Day

I was down to lift in the under 74kg category, and weighed in nice and early at 7:30am. I stepped on the scales at 71.1kg, so well within the cut off, and went for an appointment with my two best friends pre-meet – my foam roller and a strong coffee.

It was about 6 hours until I was scheduled to lift, due to a much greater than expected number of participants, so I sat nervously twiddling my thumbs, playing on my ipad, and munching on bits of Quest bar and caramel rice cakes until it was time to warm up.

The warm ups went okay, though as with every comp I’ve done, every lift still felt much heavier than it should have done. Suddenly I started to think about those missed lifts, my dodgy knee and bum hip flexor, and the fact I’d clearly been in such a bad place less than a month ago.

With much trepidation, I stepped up to the bar as my name was called for my first squat….

 

And?

Four hours later, and my Cheshire cat grin stretched from ear to ear as I greedily shovelled in mouthfuls of a well-deserved  whole roasted chicken.

I’d totalled 467.5kg – a 10kg PR in this weight class, and had gone 8 for 9, ending up with a 150kg squat (with more in the tank – poor weight calls due to nerves on my part) a 107.5kg bench and a 210kg deadlift.

 

 

 

 

 

What I Learnt

Firstly, don’t over-reach before a competition. Despite the fact I pulled through and was delighted with how I did, it was a shit scary few weeks that should have been about having fun, rather than worrying about blowing out a knee, or completely bombing in front of a room full of fellow lifters.

But, more importantly, I also learnt that you can turn any situation like this around. I definitely think a positive mental attitude helped, as did just knuckling down and doing what needed to be done.

In the future, I’m going to experiment with planned over-reaching, to see how the benefits can translate into performance increases when scheduled correctly.

 

For now however, I’m going to stick with my tried and tested methods leading up to my next meet. Wish me luck.

Tags: bench press, deadlift, meet prep, over-reaching, powerlifting, squat, strength training