De-load week, the sickness and read your books.

No pretty pictures this week, just a quick update.

So this is the 8th official week of my venture into 5/3/1, which presents the ever glorious and depressing deload week. It's truly a little of both. It absolutely sucks to have to check your ego at the door and do 40% squats after hammering home 3 PR's the week before. But, in the same breath, it's a welcome relief to get to work on form and some of those weak points you've identified in the last couple sessions. If I can't make the work hard by volume or frequency, I am going to do my best to make sure it's technically perfect. Fortunately, the timing couldn't be better for this "lighter" version of the work. I think the flu bug that is wreaking havoc on the area was somehow able to sneak it's way into the house and is attempting to make me it's first incubator. I haven't fully succumbed to it yet though. I guess, I'm kinda half sick.

A funny thing happened a few days ago. I decided to learn something correctly. For some reason I made the adult decision that I should probably purchase the book for the program I am doing that explains everything the way it was meant to look, rather than what I have been doing which was reading web-board chatter and anecdotal information from r/weightroom. Guess what! I was doing it wrong.  Not totally wrong, but there were a few little nuances which from just looking at I could immediately tell would make a ton of difference. We shall see as they get put into practice. If I think it's worth mentioning later, I'll give some insight to the changes I made. One or two light workouts in doesn't seem like long enough to accurately measure.

I am going to get through this deload, measure and then start adding conditioning in. I suppose it's probably best to do it now as Wendler had described some overall number declines when adding things like hill sprints in. I would rather take a step back while my squat is at 285 and 5 pound jumps aren't that big of a deal instead of 400, where every ounce is going to matter. The long term goal is to get stronger, let's get me stronger all the way around. Selling back a week to earn more is fine by me.

Unrelated to anything above, and I guess you can file this under the equipment part of the story...$2.00 ACE type bandages do nothing for your knees when squatting. Buy wraps. Pay the $30, and it will be worth it.