Life Update

Well, it's Summer time here in Boston and for me that means it's volleyball time! Every summer since I was 15 I've been playing in the North American Chinese Invitational Volleyball Tournament. It's a great event that brings together people from various cities across the country to participate in a form of volleyball that is very culturally based. We are also very serious about it: there are pro players, D1 College players, Club players and guys like me who never even played high school ball.

Needless to say, a lot of my training revolves around what I can do to get better at this particular sport. Mainly, I want to be able to jump higher and be able to continue jumping that height for the duration of the game/tournament. Thankfully, that's what my training has done.

During a discussion the other day, Dan (training partner) and I realized that we had, without realizing it, brought ourselves through a nearly perfect training periodization for the year of 2012. We started off the year with a Christian Thibaudeau designed hypertrophy program, which we did for 2 months. We then moved into 2 months of Advanced German Volume Training where we focused on and developed functional mass and strength gains. The next phase of our training was a pretty unstructured 2 months of ass-kicking savagery. We trained 3-4 times per week and did something heavy every day. We did lots of squats and Olympic lifts, some vertical and horizontal pulling...and we did a lot of it. No idea how many sets we were doing per day, we would just show up, warm-up and then train until we had to leave. Very recently, we started a new training regimen: The Outlaw Way. Coach Rudy writes free programming that is actually aimed at getting people ready to compete/dominate the CrossFit Games. "Oh my God! He's doing CrossFit workouts!" Well, slow your role there Chachi. I'm not exactly doing Fran every day here; take a look at his doctrine. Louie Simmons, Pripelin, Bulgarian Method, Poliquin and Wendler are his inspirations here (several of which are names that I've mentioned here multiple times). This guy just writes really solid programming. The thing he does really well, which I've yet to figure out, is programming for Olympic Weightlifting. Being that I'm pretty new to weightlifting, I've spent very little time learning how to program for it, so it's nice having someone else tell me what to do.

The other thing I'm doing right now, is training as hard as I can regardless of my volleyball practice schedule. Recovery is difficult, but that's ok. It's just practice and I don't need to have fresh legs for every practice. I'm purposely over-reaching, but I'll taper down my training and increase my recovery (eating and sleeping) in the week prior to a tournament, so I can enter the tournament feeling fresh as a daisy. Supercompensation will occur and I'll be a savage.

The most recent results of my testing are as follows: 440# deadlift, 242# clean, 315# Olympic-style high bar squat, 300# front squat, 200# bodyweight and about 11% bodyfat. I will re-test most (probably not all) of these numbers at the end of the summer and see what I was able to maintain, gain or lose. 

That's all for today! Enjoy yourself and go lift some heavy shit!