Deload week

I have a love/hate with deloads. I know I need them, and feel better after, but lazy during. I hate that feeling of shutting things down and then worrying that I might be sliding backwards. My deloads now are a lot less of a deload volume-wise, and more of a deload intensity-wise. I have really just dropped the main lift of the day to a deload intensity and kept up with the accessory/conditioning work as normal. This has helped me mentally and physically with recovery from the demands of heavy training, and the mental need to keep pushing. 

HRV

I have started tracking my heart rate variability. If you don't know what that is, it's basically a measure of the interplay of your autonomic nervous system. Your body's autonomic nervous system is the non-voluntary background system that keeps everything working like it's supposed to. It's made up of the sympathetic (Fight or Flight) and parasympathetic (Feed and Breed) divisions. When your body is doing well and not under significant stress, there is a fight between the two systems for control. This "fight" between the two systems creates differences in the time between heart beats. When your body experiences stressors, the sympathetic nervous system gains the upper hand and, consequently, the heart beats are controlled with more sympathetic input, and the differences between heartbeats decreases. That is to say, it becomes more consistent and less variable. This would mean a low heart rate variability and when measured, gives you a peak into how stressed your body is. Mine has been averaging in the mid 50s which is fairly low, so I know I need to address some things. I have started with cold water immersion and green tea supplementation as well as increasing CV conditioning. These are easy things for me to do and don't take away from my overall training goals. I would like my number to be closer to 70-80 in a few weeks. I like HRV as a measure of recovery for a couple reasons:

• Heavy explosive training and throwing taxes the CNS more than other systems and HRV measures part of the CNS.
• It's fairly easy to measure and keep track of.
• There is a high degree of correlation between higher HRV and overall recovery.

I love data on my training and recovery level and this is a good way to attain it. The next step is what to do with it.

Keep it simple.

We live in a world where there it feels like there is a distrust of simple solutions. I see this a lot in Physical Therapy and the strength and conditioning world that I live in. It seems like people believe that a simple solution won't work, or can't possibly be enough, and tend to gravitate towards the complex. I don't know if they feel that, because they don't understand it, and somebody else does, it has to be the smart solution. Maybe it's more of a feeling that if something simple would fix this, I would have tried it by now. Except that if you aren't looking for the most basic way to fix a problem first, you will miss potentially simple solutions while looking for the more complex. It may also be that simple just isn't glamorous.

Simple is, well, simple. Simple probably doesn't get clicks or shares or likes. Simple is banging out reps and sets by yourself knowing that if you progressively overload your body with compound, multi-joint movements, you will get stronger. Simple is understanding that if you are plateauing in a movement, lift, or throw, it's your body's way of telling you that the stimulus is incorrect. Find something similar but different. It's your body's way of telling you, your recovery is not on point, your diet sucks, your sleep is off, your life is contributing more stress than your body can deal with. Simple is a dynamic warm up that is first general, then specific to the movement of the day. Are you doing cleans, squats, and good mornings? Make sure you are loose or mobile enough to get through the movement fully, and then get after it. There is no warm-up more specific to a movement, than that particular movement. Why are you spending 30 minutes on full body mobility before you squat, when 5 minutes of mobilization for the tight spots and a slow work up in the squat is all you need. That's making it too complex. You are wasting precious training time on something that is a low priority. If you can comfortably take a squat to depth without issue, your hips don't need mobilization. If you can catch a clean comfortably on your shoulders in a deep front squat, your ankles, wrists, and shoulders don't need mobilization.

On the other hand, if your body is a wreck, and you can't perform the movement even partially without issues due to joint problems, hypomobility, tightness, etc. The simple solution is to stay away from the lift for a while until you have your body right with the various stretches, mobilizations, and any soft tissue work that is needed for the particular body area. It's not exciting, but it's what you need, when you need it and nothing more. As training progresses and individuals become more advanced in training and life, time is precious. If you can only carve out an hour a day, what are your priorities?

Pound in a nail? Use a hammer.

Screw in a screw? Use a screwdriver.

Welp! Another long time without updating due to life, training, work, etc. I don't feel that I get much out of logging anymore. Maybe that is just laziness disguised as thoughtfulness, but I feel like with the autoregulatory work I'm doing, and keeping track of my main lift progression in the offseason, that I just don't feel the need to look back and check things out like I used to. I may try to do some writing on some topics that I feel would be nice to get down on paper (or pixels) for posterity I suppose.

The 2016 Highland Games season has come and gone. I feel like I put together my best all around season and certainly my averages for competition throws on the year have all improved. I keep track of best throws through the season through the NASGA Database and calculate the averages of everything except the Caber, which is hard to do with the variability. I have goals for my averages, which I feel is more important than goals for actually throwing distances. You are only as good as your worst throw and as your worst throw continues to improve, you will be progressing. I definitely have distance goals that I would like to hit in the next year, but who cares if I hit all those goals in the first two months of the season and then drop off for the rest of the year. I would have made my goals, but my overall performance would be terrible.

I felt that I matched up pretty well this year to some of the top guys and am encouraged that I feel I haven't put together my best games yet with some throws being "there" on some days on gone on others. Estes was probably my best all together games ever and I ended up winning that with 3 personal bests. Overall, I ended up 3rd at the Classic and I believe 2nd overall on the NASGA board.

My offseason training between '15 and '16 really went well and I feel I put together my best offseason of training by just going back to the basics that I know how to do. This is for another post, but it bears repeating. I know my body. I've been at this whole strength sport thing for a while now and have a lot of years in the gym, and hours in the books, understanding how everything goes together. I've tried other people's programs with limited results. I can say with nearly 100% confidence that autoregulatory training, or any variant on that, is really what I progress the best with. Sub-maximal, Autoregulatory with a continual focus on the real goal is really what I believe is my best training methodology.

The 2016-17 offseason is progressing well and I really didn't lose a lot during the season, which is very encouraging. The only thing that fell off was my full clean because, surprise, I didn't do them at all during the season. Instead, I elected to move to the hang clean for all my clean work as I feel it has a better carryover to my throws.

Hopefully I can update with 1-2 posts per week on training, life, throws, or geeky PT/Biomechanics things that may help anybody who stumbles across this mess of a training log.