I usually have a 20+ mile run on or around my birthday every year (Woo! 40yrs old with abs!) that coincides with some silly marathon I’m running in the spring or fall. In 2019 I blew out my knee on a 25 mile training run for an ultra marathon. I lost that season and rehabbed for a year. I signed up for a Spring 2020 marathon, but because of COVID it got delayed until the Fall of 2020. And then it got delayed until the spring of 2021. By that time I was just mentally and physically fatigued from peaking with no race to run. I decided to take a break and put some much needed muscle on my skinny ass.
This is the first time in 10 years or so that I have been consistent with weight training and the first time in my life that I have been consistent with leg training. My exercise of choice for the last decade has been running and some Jiu Jitsu. I shifted my focus to weights in the summer of 2021 and have been focusing on improving my barbell back squat since August 2021. My squat has jumped from ~160lbs for 5 reps to 240lbs for 5 reps in the video. Starting body weight was ~170lbs, current is 185lbs. A 1 RM calculator puts me at ~270lbs. This is 45lbs away from my year end goal of 315lbs - 1RM. I think I cleaned up the form as much as I can on my own. I video and assess all the time and add cues and practice technique with light loads at least once a week and squat 2x a week. I can break parallel without issue and my back is mostly straight throughout the lift, neither of which were true when I started. I think my bar path still needs some work as I feel as though I’m pushing through my heels and not my whole foot. I notice my feet splay outwards sometimes as I progress with reps. Using some data extrapolations I think that it is reasonable that I will hit 315 1RM by December 2022/January 2023 - around 275lbs for 5 reps or so. Assumptions:
I don’t expect linear progression to continue. Adding 80lbs in 8 months (10lbs/mo) is nice but not sustainable long term as I exhaust neuromuscular adaptation/n00b gains. Adding an additional 35 lbs over the next 8 months seems reasonable if not a little conservative. 4.4lbs/month seems doable.
I need more lean body mass. ~10-15lbs of total weight is my best guesstimate on what will help the most without adding too much body fat. There is probably something to be said about overall muscle size to support the weight on your back. Calorie bump incoming.
Deadlift: My form is still not the best and am still working on technique with very little weight. As this lift gets better it will add more strength to my posterior chain that should have some synergistic carryover to my squat. I’ll add a second deadlift day to my week and bifurcate the training with heavy/light loads. I did this with the squat and it paid dividends in my progress. I have cleaned up my setup a bit lately. I’ve focused on foot placement, lat/trap engagement, taking the slack out of the bar, making sure my armpits are over the bar and lowering my hips while keeping my back straight. It’s coming along fine. My current last set is 225lbs for 5 reps with probably 4-6 reps in reserve. It’s a matter of gaining more confidence with the lift before I scale it up more. 400lbs by January 2023 should be a walk in the park.
Secondary/Tertiary movements. I’m almost certainly leaving a lot of hypertrophy gains and by extension some strength gains on the table by not doing leg press, hack squats, leg extensions, leg curls. These will allow me to overload the leg muscles without much additional stress on other joints that add too much fatigue to the system. I’ll add some of these in when I do a program adjustment next.
Bump calories to ~3800/day from May - August. I can’t afford to lose weight as I train for some summer races. I won’t be running more than a half marathon distance so I won’t need to train that hard/much therefore I don’t expect there to be an interference effect with squat/deadlift strength gains.
