What The Ladies Have Been Up To

#1 AE has competed as a fitness/ figure contestant in the past and I have been helping her on and off over the past few months. Her primary goal has been to add some size to her 5'0" 107-pound frame. We spent some time organizing her upper body training as the main issue is she is doing too much and not enough, heavy enough. Recently we have been doing lower body training once a week when her schedule permits. Her last training session looked like this:

Squat worked up to 125x5
Bulgarian split squat 5x10-15 up to 25 pound DBs
GHR 5x10-15
One legged calf raises with a hold 2-count hold @ the top 3x8/35
Sprinter sit-ups 3x20

She has also pulled 129x5. Previously, for example, she would squat, working up to 3 sets of 15, then do 3 different exercises for her quads followed by 3 different hamstring exercises (not including calf exercises). Sets and reps were usually in the range of 4x10-15. Her complaint was that she was not seeing any improvement and was suffering nagging aches and pains and strains. We lowered the volume and pushed the weights up and are seeing good results.

#2 IH is a longtime client. When she started with me she was very weak and was not in shape to train. She also had physical condition that made it difficult to perform certain exercises so it was challenging to find another way(s) to get the results we wanted. In the past year she has come a long way, pulling a personal best deadlift of 188 pounds at a bodyweight of 125 at the end of 2009, much leaner in the process, as well. Over the past four months, I have been writing her training programs and she has been on her own for the most part. She has been following the 5-3-1 protocol in her main lifts. She felt that she was not "pushing" herself enough on her own and decided to train with me again for a month. Currently we are doing more max effort type work, which we have had success with in the past. Following are some of her recent trainings:

2/20/10 Rack pulls 205x3 (PR)
2/21/10 Close grip benchpress (index finger @ the edge of the knurl) 75x5, 85x3 (PR)
2/27/10 Zercher squat 205x3 (PR)
2/28/10 One-board benchpress 85x3

She trains with me three times a week. A fourth day is optional with either a barbell complex or a circut of exercises performed. The second upper body training each week is a repetition method day working up to 4 sets of 12-15 reps.

#3 RE continues to help the Crimson on their run through the Ivy League. She scored in double digits, with 13, in the Crimson's defeat of Brown on February 26. On the 27th she helped her team to their seventh straight victory with a 68-60 win over Yale. In that game she had 13 points, five assists and four rebounds. She moved into 10th at her school for all-time assists. The Crimson are 18-7, 9-2 in the Ancient Eight entering a regular season ending three game homestand. They face Penn Friday night before a crucial game against league leading Princeton on Saturday, finishing with Dartmouth.

I had a female client doing sled pulls across the parking lot Sunday and a guy leaving the gym yelled something like, "that's some real Rocky-like s&^t you're doing there!" He said some other things which I couldn't really hear but sounded like they followed the same vein. He's a regular member and a local football coach and trains semi-intelligently (when compared to the average gym rat). I said to my client, "I always find it odd that the guys make all these comments but when I ask them if they want to join in, they have some excuse not to!" It ain't the first time it has happened.

Food for thought.

Stay strong,
Ed T.