5-28-14 – Max Effort Lower Body, Front Squat

After the meet on May 24th, most of my days in HPF have consisted of just rest and relaxation. Today, I received my new program. Not only was it a new cycle, but it was a new program entirely. At first, I was very skeptical about it. I had always trained on my old program since day one, and I didn’t really know too much else. But, nevertheless, I was willing to give it a shot. My first day on it was max effort lower body front squats. Before this day, I had never done any sort of front squats so this was completely new to me. I used the yoke bar instead of a regular barbell to pull me forward a bit more. With my warm-ups with just the bar, they felt amazing. I really liked the way front squats felt. I slowly moved my way up the weights, completely sets of five until the fifth rep began to feel difficult. At this point, I dropped the amount of reps to three until the third rep began to feel difficult, where I then dropped it to just singles. I made my way to 245 for a pretty difficult single, but I figured the program asks for max effort, so why not go higher? I just put a five on each side, got under the bar, and squatted down and never came back up. I just sat on the ground laughing before reloading the weights to 195 where I did a down set for seven reps.