Hey everybody, this is just an update post to let you know whats going on with me during the pandemic. A lot has changed, most of it is very positive, but some has been negative too. Fortunately, as of this post, everybody in my family is happy, healthy, and safe. My girlfriend’s family is mostly happy healthy and safe as well, however her grandma from Florida recently contracted the virus and is currently asymptomatic in her nursing home. I have never met her grandma but from what I’ve seen and heard she is a super tough and stubborn lady that wont give up without a fight. As for me, I was fortunate enough to find a part time teaching job, and am teaching in person at an elementary school. There are obviously some risks, and already only a week in one of my students has been marked as a close contact to someone who has tested positive for COVID19. I don’t think there is anything to worry about at the moment, as the school is staying super vigilant and we are all working together to do the right thing for each other and our students, but I do believe that these things will be a more common occurrence moving forward.
A bunch of other things have happened for me earlier this year tho aside from that, which have been really great. I had the entire summer off with my girlfriend. We spent so many weekends up at the lake, it was very nice. Usually we can only swing a few weekends up there, but we’ve spent maybe triple the time up there then normal this year, which is awesome. For those of you that don’t know, I also am a professional yo-yoer, and have been yoyoing since before I was a teenager. This year because of the pandemic I took up a new yoyo-related hobby, which was CAD designing yo-yos. I learned (with a lot of help from friends) the ins and outs of yoyo design and how to draw yo-yos of different shapes, sizes, materials, etc. As of this post, I have actually had two yo-yo designs of mine get machined into real life yo-yos, with a third one currently being machined. It is super exciting and is something that I am super passionate about. Ive developed friends and relationships with a lot more yo-yo ers in the community because of this as well, which is another awesome outcome from this as well.
On the lifting front, I have been doing what I can to improve not just my general overall health, but the issues my body has had over the past year. I’ve continued to stretch my high hip and have been seeing some improvements in the last month or so specifically. I believe the main culprit to this is my right psoas being overly tight and weak. I have been stretching it daily multiple times a day and doing a lot more core and stability exercises as well (Planning on doing a write up on this in the future). I’ve also been really working hard on my ankle mobility restriction in my left ankle. This has been improving slowly, but has been at a decent threshold for me during my squats and other lower body movements from warming up with them everyday as well as doing some type of calf raise every day after creating that extra mobility.
We are also fortunate enough to have gotten some new equipment over the past week. We set up a power rack in my grandpa’s basement which we all use in order to hit our big lifts(I used it once, not going back until friday after I am sure that I am not a carrier for COVID) and we got some new bars and a weight holder for squats/lower body for the home gym downstairs. A new bench and some padding for deadlifts will also be arriving soon, which is super cool and is something im really looking forward to using. The split I am planning on using will be a full body split 3x a week, featuring winning warmups and a very basic/barebones setup, that looks something like this:
Monday: Heavy squat, secondary bench, secondary deadlift, rows, core exercise.
Wednesday: Home gym rep/pump day that is basically 100 reps of body weight exercises + smaller muscles and some type of weighted carry.
Friday: Heavy Bench, Heavy deadlift, secondary squat, rows, core exercise.
The plan is to use the 3/5/1 setup I used in the past for my heavy lifts as I really enjoyed doing that and felt like I made good strength gains with that type of setup. For secondary work, im planning on picking an exercise for 4-6 weeks and getting stronger in a given rep range with that exercise. These set/rep ranges will be different depending on the movement itself(I.E. doing sets of 3 for pause squats vs sets of 6 on a spoto press). Hopefully it will work out and be fun and I will fix all my imbalances over time with proper pre/rehab work and learning to use my core better.
