Squat Friday

Today is squat day. It's also Friday. And for me that's usually not a very good combination. You see, Friday is typically the day I find it the most difficult to get motivated to work out. I often postpone it until Saturday or do a very abbreviated version of my regularly scheduled session. Today, I'm determined not to allow the low-motivation factor to affect what I do. In fact, I'm planning on making this a big workout. The kind that will give me momentum to push through the following week with ease.

I'm following 5/3/1 to the letter in terms of the working sets on the squats. After that I'm going to strip plates off and do some higher-rep work in addition to leg press for assistance-type exercises. I'm cutting a couple of sets off the leg curls to do some lunges and step-ups. This ought to give me my legs a good workout without the risk of overtraining. I'm doing lower weights and high reps for everything after the working sets of squats. I topped out today at 205 on the squats, performing 5 reps. Yeah, I should've done a couple more in that last set, but since I'm doing the extra assistance work today, I didn't see the need.

I dropped down to 175 on the squats after the set at 205, completing 10 reps. I followed that up with another set at 175 for 8 reps and then moved to the vertical leg press at 355 for 12 reps, supersetted with standing leg curls at 20 lbs. for 15 reps across three sets.

So my plan was squats, vertical leg press + leg curls, squats, lunges, step-ups. Lower weight, lots of reps in the second round of squats.

I made one minor miscalculation, however. It's really, really difficult to do any-rep squats after you've already completed eight sets followed by five sets of leg presses. So when I went back to the squats with 155 loaded on the bar, I found that seven reps was the most I could do without my legs going on strike. As it was, they threatened a walk-out on that seventh rep, but I convinced them to stick with me at least until I racked the bar.

I went down to 135 on the next set, and my legs didn't protest as much, but they sure weren't happy either. Next Friday I may wake up and find them missing.

And then I was staring at those dumbbells for the lunges, and they leered back maniacally. I was ready to give up, but, dammit!, I will not be taunted by a set of 35-lb. dumbbells! So I compromised with my ego and did one set of lunges supersetted with one set of step-ups.

At that point I said, stick a fork in me; pizza's waiting in the kitchen.

As always, the entire debacle is logged on Fitocracy.