Training strength

Over the past 14 and a half months I've been putting an increased emphasis on learning about strength training and trying to apply the things I've read to my training. Initially I started with the heureka moment that what I'd been doing was, to a great extent, just wasting time at the gym without any clue of what should be done and how stuff should be programmed. So, as appears to be the fairly common story online, I ran across Mark Rippetoe's Starting Strength, and spent time learning the lifts, learning the program and learning the ideas behind building strength. At the same time I also started to increase the granularity of the data I was tracking from my exercises, and strength training is very nice as it allows you to follow with a relatively high granularity what your strength with respect to different exercises are and accumulating the data was relatively easy.

I recently also wrote some scripts to programmatically extract my training data from Fitocracy, which otherwise would have been a relatively tedious task (for those interested, the key words here are phantomjs and scraping the site). Having automated this, the next task is to start building up some dashboards for displaying the data to help give a more intuitive feeling for what has been going on. For now there is no neat interactive widget yet for that, but I did try out some rather rudimentary tests in Excel.

First off, the first diagram below represents the maximum weight used for an exercise at a given date in time and the 30 days prior to it. I should have filtered based on maximum weights for certain rep counts, but because there is a bit of flakiness and certain periods of not following the program exactly, I opted instead to use the maximum weight observed. This is a relatively good proxy as I don't progress to higher weights prior to being able to achieve five reps with the lower weight first. An additional thing to note is that the initial steep climb with the barbell squats isn't really as steep; having barely hit 120, I used a belt to get up to 130, so the first two peaks for the squats should in reality be lower. Asides from that all of the reps have been done raw with no belt or other weight lifting gear.

It should, I guess, be mentioned that adhering to the program turned out to be too much at times and hence the best I can say is that a followed the spirit of the program. :) To a certain degree, however, one can see the waves emerging as patterns in the training, which demonstrate the deloads at certain points and then the pursuit for newer records. The deadlifts illustrate this the best way.

I also ran across an interesting article on T-Nation, in which the author outlined some strength standards he had observed over the duration of his career. The standards had been structured as relative comparisons to a certain baseline. For instance, with a deadlift of X, his empirical observations would suggest that the person should be able to back squat 71.4% of the deadlift. So, taking the deadlift as a baseline and using that as a predictor for the other lifts and using that to scale the actual lifts, we're able to draw a picture of which lifts are relatively higher than they should and which lower.

Of course every individual is different, so strong conclusions can't really be drawn from these types of analyses. What they are, however, somewhat useful for are identifying if you have significant imbalances between lifts, which perhaps should be addressed to achieve a somewhat stable system. Imbalances tend to often be associated with decreased progress later on as well as potentially causing injuries or other problems.

What is apparent in my case is that the lifts where the main components stems from pushing, namely the press and the bench press, my long arms give me an inherent disadvantage, which is also apparent in that they are relatively speaking the weakest lifts at the moment out of the five lifts. That is mainly due to the recent advances made in deadlifting, which in turn mainly stem from some a-ha moments with my deadlifting technique. Also, the disproportionately strong squat as visible in the left part of the diagram wasn't in fact as strong, mainly because of the aforementioned use of the belt, which inflated the results a bit.

Going forward from this, I think that the current "fuckarounditis" of a program that I have at the moment, which is a very much bastardized Starting Strength routine has served its purpose of getting me acquainted with training with weights and the next thing is to move onto some other program. At the moment I have a feeling I'll be giving Bill Starr's intermediate 5x5 program a try for some cycles. But we'll see.