Sunday 5.10: Squats

Sunday. Smolov, back squats 7x5 (125kg).

The wedding ceremony and party afterwards was awesome, and it went rather late in the night before we headed to bed. It was time to clean the place up today in the morning and it took some time after 80 people had been partying all night long. We started the engine at early afternoon and drove about 3 hours home. We didn't sleep last night a lot so we obviously tired as we got home. We ate and then I had to take a nap, it felt like I'm about to fall asleep just like that. It felt like it would be awesome to sleep until net morning but there were squats written in my agenda for today so I took a short nap instead and headed to the gym.

Strength.

• Smolov, back squat 7x5 (125kg)

It wasn't the easiest day to come at the gym to work hard. However, I payed a lot of attention to warm-up, I did some crosstrainer to get muscles warm, then lots of mobility drills, hip openers and foam rolling to really activate entire lower body. That did well to my body and I was ready to hit it! These weights are serious stuff for me now. The first 2 weeks of Smolov was easy but then it's been tough every day. I've been able to nail all sets as prescribed, and I'm actually very proud of it.

Today was not exception. Completing 7 sets of 5's with 125kg was a bit frightening =) I thought about it for the entire weekend a little but I decided to manhandle the weights no matter what. And I got them done as planned, c'mon! It's interesting that my legs are feeling okay after each squat session. They're actually feeling much more fresh compared to sessions before Smolov. I guess they are now used to squatting a lot and don't get jammed that bad.

Another thing I'm proud of is the depth of my squat. I believe that really strengthens my legs even more compared to going just below parallel. Going all the way down must have lots of benefits strength-wise, plus I'm anticipating it to better my squat clean as well. Once I'm getting comfortable being under this much weight in the very bottom, I hope I have more guts to get under the bar faster in the clean as well.

Recap of squats

Completing 7 sets takes a lot of time and energy so I packed up my gear and went home to eat more and recover. It's gonna be another squat session tomorrow. Here's a couple of pictures from yesterday.

Wedding car was a Mustang from the 60's

My beautiful fiancé

C'mon, I won the garter as the groom tossed it to the crowd =)