Monday 8 July - Tuesday 9 July Training

Monday

Squat
     135# x 2 x 5
     185# x 5
     200# x 10 x 10

RDL
     170# x 4 x 10

Reverse Hyper
     225# x 4 x 10

GHD Sit Ups / Band Good Mornings
     10 Reps / Green Band x 10

Tuesday

Press
     65# x 5
     100# x 10 x 10

Incline DB Press
    55# x 10
    60# x 10
    65# x 2 x 10

Seated DB Shoulder Press
     40#
     30#
     35# x 2 x 10

Incline Skulls / Pull Aparts
     65# x 10 / 4 x 25

Neck Linear Flexion / Extension / Lateral Flexion / Extension
     40# x 10 each direction
     30# x 10 each direction



Squats were appropriately miserable on monday. Plus i forgot my knee sleeves, which was less than pleasant too. Bumped up my RDLs a bit and added banded good mornings just as a superset finisher. I'm not sure how i feel about these because the load drops as the band gets shorter at the bottom, but they accomplished basically what i was looking for, and that was some light extra finishing work. I usually neglect to train my abs, because i'm lazy, but direct ab work does help things, so ill make a concerted effort to throw some in twice a week.

Presses were also garbage. I did more push press today towards the end, which is whatever. I'm really just trying to build larger muscles rather than stronger ones now, so as long as it starts on my shoulders and ends locked out, i suppose its ok. I tried to exaggerate the negative on the push presses to really grind out the last few reps. I also decided to do DB shoulder press after inclines to do more overhead work. Don't ask me why. It sucked. And was dumb. I did more than enough overhead work with 100 reps of presses. Screw it.

So, the head strength coach at Columbia is really big into neck training, and rightfully so. The most common injuries in football are concussions and acl tears. Acl tears just kind of happen most times, via a hit from a bad angle or a hard plant, but all you can really do is build proper proportions of anterior / posterior leg strength and hope for the best honestly. With concussions though, its much more severe and injury and it can cause paralysis and even death, so training the musculature surrounding the cervical vertebrae (your neck for the un-anatomically inclined) will directly correlate to a stronger neck and a neck more adept to dispersing perturbations. Yea, i said dispersing perturbation. He even made a custom neck machine, which on one side can accomplish flexion / extension exercises, and on the other you can do rotational exercises.

I asked him what exactly is the benefit for a strength athlete, not necessarily a contact sport athlete. Basically, the cervical spine and lumbar spine (upper neck / lower back) mirror each other, and whenever the spine is loaded, the weakest link is what matters, and in some cases, this can be the upper neck area. Build a strong base for your head, transfer that strength down the chain to the rest of your spine, generate more force, get more jacked. This being said, ill train neck twice a week, once in a flexion / extension manner and once in a rotational. If you want to truly be strong, you can't have any weak points. A true strength athlete makes his entire body strong, not just the pieces he likes to train.