Sunday 28.9: Squats, Clean technique

Sunday. Strength, Smolov squats 7x5 (across 115kg). Clean technique.

I got back from Vierumäki yesterday evening to spend the night at home, so we slept until 10.00am, ate well and went to the gym with my beautiful fiancé. It was time for another squat session, it's getting more brutal all the time. There's not much rest between squat sessions, tomorrow's another session, cool haha. It was awesome to have my big bro join as at the training session. Sipa worked on his snatch and then hit a bad ass workout afterwards. The rest of the day was spent at the in-laws as we celebrated Pauliina's mother's birthday. I'd call this a good Sunday!

My bro

Strength.

• Smolov, back squat 7x5 (across 115kg)

Another session of having weight in back rack position and going up and down. Reps per set came down, number of sets came up, same with the load. Total of 7 sets at 115kg. I haven't had problems with the sets this far. At times they have felt a bit more nasty but really it's been weights I have been able to manhandle.

And I'm really happy I've been able to squat with a good depth from the day I started to put my butt way below parallel. I'm feeling confident with squatting now. The volume is gonna be huge compared to a regular month in September and it's gonna continue high in October as well. This might have a positive side effect on technique too as there will be so much repetition.

To my eye this form is what I'm looking for currently. Obviously there will be someone finding flaws in it but right now I'm happy with this. And my main coach Toni has approved it, the only thing he's looking for is a wider stance but that hurts in my hips so I'll stick with this narrow style which feels great.

Recap

Barbell.

• Clean technique

My brother had some good tips on my starting position for clean. I was open minded as he came to the gym and showed it real time. Basically he made me go lower, more heels-oriented, and shoulder blades more tightly together. For some reason this resulted the barbell hitting my quads higher which obviously is a great thing. The bar also felt it came up a little easier.

I only took about 20 reps with 40-60kg weights so let's not be hasty and make presumptions too quickly. I'm gonna work on this technique and once hitting the timings better it should result in heavier barbells.

My brother hit a workout written by Ben Bergeron, taken from competitorstraining.com. Looked awful as he was doing it. The workout stood:

• 30 thruster, 50kg
• 30 pull-up
• 30 power clean, 50kg
• 30 burpee
• 30 push jerk, 50kg
• 30 box