Tag: deadlifts

Winter Gym is Over

I needed to get stronger if I was ever to run faster. This was my reason for signing up to the gym. At home I have some weighted vests, dumbbells and other equipment for the workouts I’ve been doing the past few years but I realised if I wanted to get stronger, I needed to lift heavier. That presented a choice – either buy more equipment which would take up space in my house and get used relatively infrequently or join the gym.

Ahead of returning to the gym I began to get excited thinking back to the times I’d lifted weights before. There were two primary periods – at the start of the 1990s when I was a teenager and in 2007-08 in my late thirties. I remember being able to bench press multiple reps at 90kg as a teenager and squat reps of 130kg in the Smith machine in my thirties. Now in my fifties would I still be able to achieve these standards?

While these might have been classed as goals, I wasn’t interested in setting specific goals. I had a vague goal – get stronger and stay healthy. Consequently the first few weeks in the gym were spent very carefully setting up for squats, deadlifts and bench press in the free weights area. Partly making sure I understood how to set up the equipment correctly but also prioritisiting technique over lifting heavy weights. I also didn’t want to get sore by trying to lift anything too heavy, too soon.

In the first session I found myself comfortably half-squatting 8 reps of 50kg and bench pressing 5x60kg. Four weeks later I was doing some half squats at 110kg and struggling to bench a couple of reps at 70kg.

My priorities have changed over the months as I identified weaknesses. For example, with the bench press, I attempted to press 80kg at Christmas and failed. I didn’t make the progress I was hoping to make considering I’d been able to do 65kg on my second session. So I moved to using the Chest Press machine to see if that would help. It didn’t and when I attempted 80kg again in my final session I got stuck and had my spotter give me a little bit of help to get it past the sticking point. Maybe next year.

Similarly I went to the gym intending to strengthen glutes and quads using squats and deadlifts. I stopped deadlifting at Christmas because I had a pulled a muscle in my back and need it to recover.

Injuries like that have been a part of this gym training but not while there. Both sides of my back (rhomboids) and both hamstrings have been strained but these injuries occurred while doing sprints. I believe it’s because I’ve strengthed the muscles and am now putting forces through other parts of the body which aren’t used to it. Injuries led me to add exercises to strengthen the adductors, abductors and hamstrings (leg curl) which can only be beneficial.

With squats my initial aim was to push the weight as high as possible over the training period. I reached 149kg just before Christmas in the Smith machine and added another 10kg just after but unracking the bar began to feel like it was squashing my torso even just standing with the weight on my shoulders. At the same time I realised my deep squats, where I could barely do a single effort at 70-80kg, were too low by comparison and since the New Year I focused on upping this. It’s been very successful as I managed to do a 100kg deep paused squat in my final week and felt there was capacity for another rep. I still occasionally worked the top end and managed to do multiple sets and reps of quarter-squats at 160kg in the free weights area.

On my final leg session I repeated my so-called Seb Squat Challenge which I did with half squats at Christmas and this time attempted it with deep squats. I completed it successfully but it might well have been the toughest session I’ve done. The ten reps at 85kg left me gulping for breath, just like when I’ve been sprinting!

Going to the gym twice per week has been enjoyable without feeling like I’m overdoing it. With my sessions on Mondays and Thursdays, it’s allowed me to go to parkrun on a Saturday with relatively fresh legs. While I didn’t have a benchmark run from before the weights I ran 23mins in my first month, the same again at Christmas, slipped to 25mins while injured and then have rebuilt it to 23mins with increased daily runs of 2-3 miles but no speedwork outside of very short sprints.

And this non-movement in parkrun time is while having putting on about 15lbs / 7kg / 1-stone in weight. My legs have grown by 2 inches / 5cm; as has my chest and arms – I look more like a rugby player than a runner. I detailed how my gym shorts ripped last month and when I put my tailored shorts on again a few weeks back they no longer fitted, they were far too tight. It’s been like that with most of my clothes.

It was never my aim to get bigger but I guess it’s inevitable as you add strength. I deliberately did low rep sets which are meant to avoid muscle hypertrophy. I particularly didn’t want to add upper body weight which doesn’t provide much, if any, benefit to running and maybe that’s why my bench press never improved back to my teenage days. But I was never in this to look good, it was always about functional training – providing muscle for power and health.

There is no doubt it has been an excellent investment of my time. As a general estimate I’ve added 20-30% strength in all the exercises I’ve been doing. I notice when I’m running I feel very stable around my core, my legs feel strong and that there is more to come.

While I could continue going to the gym over the summer, my aim is now to focus on turning the strength into power and rebuilding my lacate threshold to run faster over sprints and parkrun. I’m also interested to see how my body reshapes without any gym work, how much of the strength I’ve developed is retained and how quickly I can reaccess it next winter.

Back at the gym

I’m back at the gym for the first time in over fifteen years. The last time I did any serious weight lifting was in the 2007-2009 period and I’m not sure I did much towards the end of that because I discovered yoga. When I left the gym, the yoga ended and my main activities became golf and running. Apart from a couple of circuit training classes in the following year, I haven’t done any organised fitness classes since.

That said, over the years I’ve built up an array of small home gym equipment. When I was sixteen I bought a pair of dumbbells which could hold up to 10kg each. Being a teenager, full of wishful thinking, I had visions of getting muscular and strong whereas reality shows I barely used them. When we moved house a few years later my dad put them away in the loft and they didn’t reappear until about a decade ago when he found them in a clearout! He sent them to me and once again they sat in a corner unused until, I decided that while running would keep my lower half strong, I needed to do something to ensure I didn’t get too skinny up top with all the miles I was doing. I was fairly conscientous for a few months until for one reason or another I stopped.

When the pandemic struck I next became interested in them and have been consistently training since then – the dumbbells, some press-ups and corework. The few extra items of home gym are a 15kg dumbbell, a couple of weighted vests – 5kg and 6-10kg adjustable, a skipping rope, a 5kg medicine slam ball and some push up bars. In the backgarden there’s a pile of 12 patio slabs which I used for doing some legwork variations like step-ups and touchdown squats.

With these past 3-4 years being the first time I’ve trained consistently at home – I’ve gradually got stronger and fitter. My general system has been to do a small amount of exercise that only takes a few minutes and therefore isn’t foreboding. Doing three sets of press-ups each lasting fifteen seconds with a minute’s recovery can be done in the time spent waiting for the kettle to boil and make the cup of tea. And it doesn’t feel too tiring either.

I also only trained twice per week – I didn’t want it to become onerous. I didn’t want to have to train with aches or soreness like I do when I run every day.  I wanted to feel fresh and ready for each session. Importantly I didn’t have any major goals when I began other than to add on to the existing fitness I already had.

For me, keeping a log or spreadsheet of what I’d done is very motivating. Seeing the weeks of training become months of training gives me a sense of pride and fulfilment. I like flicking between where I started and where I’ve reached and seeing how the gradual improvement is turning into something bigger. Seeing all those weeks filled in and ticked off.

When I started it was all meant to be achievable within a few minutes.  Yet as I got stronger it began to feel fine to train for longer. Sometimes I would begin to feel stale with the training so I would add extra reps or time of duration to my exercises. I would add sets or reduce the recovery time or whatever. Initially that change would make things feel harder and then as the body adapts begin to become my new normal.

Occasionally I would feel it was time for an overhaul and to make more drastic changes. At one stage, I was doing an hour’s worth of corework twice per week. That’s not the “while the kettle boils” I set out with but shows how enthusiasm and willingness grow as an exercise regime beds in. Doing that hour was good but I decided I needed to get it back down to manageable and revamped so I was back down at twenty minutes but with more challenging sets and reps.

A few times I introduced new exercises. Some of them lasted, others didn’t. But the main idea of working out twice per week has remained.

As this year has gone by I found I was beginning to run out of ways to challenge myself with my home gym. Doing more reps is more time consuming and simply allows you to do more reps at a particular weight. If you want to get bigger (i.e. bodybuilding) then more reps is how you do that. But as a runner, I’m not interested in adding muscle mass.

What I really wanted to do was get stronger especially in the lower body which you can do by lifting heavier weights but with few reps. This meant I had a choice to make. Either buy more weights so I could train heavier to get stronger or join a gym. I decided on the latter because I don’t want my home cluttered up with loads of weights that I only use for a small part of the week.

I’ve joined my local gym on a six month membership which will take me through the winter and then allow me to get back outdoors running for the summer.  When I started at the beginning of October I was tentative. I’ve never done deadlifts, which are considered a great exercise for runners, and fifteen years ago I was squatting about 130kg which is about 1.5 times my body weight of 85kg. All these years later I wasn’t sure what I’d be capable of lifting, so in my first week I was squatting only 50kg which is closer to half my body weight. I didn’t want to do too much in the first week and feel sore for days so that was another reason to start carefully. Of course the most important reason was I didn’t want to overdo squats or deadlifts, use poor form, get injured or rip up my back. When I was squatting heavy all those years ago, I was doing it in a Smith machine which helps with control, now I’m doing it freestanding.

I’ve been pleased with my progress. After the first couple of weeks of taking it steady and reaching 70kg squat I then began to increase each week. Seven weeks on, I could manage to squat 115kg albeit I recognise I’m not going deep enough. This week I’ve dropped the weight back down to 100kg and working on improving that depth.

In joining the gym, I said I wasn’t going to set targets but I’m inevitably haunted by the ghosts of the past. When I was 18-19 I weight trained with a friend three times per week but everything was 3 sets of 10 reps and when I could do 12 reps then to move up to the heavier weight. I used the same approach fifteen years. Knowing what I know now, I hope I may be able to get better results than ever before. Now I’m doing only two days per week to aid recovery while still wanting to fit in running on other days. I’m focusing on lifting heavier with lower rep counts but occasionally doing lower weights to build support for the heavier weights. I’m keeping a log of my progress to help motivate and be sure of what I did last time.

Somewhere at the back of my mind I’m thinking if I can add 10kg per month to my squats and deadlifts then by the end of my membership as April rolls around I’ll be stronger than I’ve ever been before. When I took up running seriously in 2010-11 I was still very strong legged from the previous weights I’d done. I’ve no doubt I lost much of that over the past decade with too much distance running and rarely challenging my top-end speed. That’s not to say I haven’t done blocks of hill training in these years which can be as effective as the weights room but it’s been fun going back to the free weights and having my strength quantified.