I think there may be something wrong with my squat form – I figured out my 1-rep max yesterday and now my lower back hurts. I suspect I curved it the wrong way at some point. (It’s a several step process: a three stage warmup, with a couple minutes rest between stages, then you load on 5-10%, try to lift it, rest, rinse, repeat, for not more than 5 sets after the warmup.) I’m not thrilled with the end result, either; I only managed about 5 lbs less than my body weight. On the other hand, that’s doing it properly (or at least as best I could) trying to get all the way down until my femur (not the bottom of my thigh) was parallel to the ground. It’s way lower than you’d think. I can shift much more weight if I don’t go all the way down, of course, but then that doesn’t do me as much good. It’s definitely not worth doing for bragging rights even just in my own head – better to be a weakling than a poser!
We don’t have a mirror by the squat cage, but Rudder (who was hanging around for safety’s sake – and maybe to procrastinate on his own erging) had the brilliant idea of filming me. Unfortunately that resulted in my having to redo a few lifts, as I could see I hadn’t gone down nearly far enough.
After that I did 10 km on the erg (Rudder did a half-marathon (\eyeroll). And then we biked to the pet store for catfood because it was shopping Sunday, but apparently that only affects stores right in the Centrum. So we rode back and did a few other errands instead, then came home and I made a big pot of chili.
Other weekend events were our trip to Delft and my booking details of a March trip to England – I’m going to turn 40 in London! (Sorry, still squee-ing.) Also, Rudder did lots of real studying (poor thing, language is so hard for him) while I did a more congenial form of “studying” – that is, I went back to reading Harry Potter en de Steen der Wijszen. It’s still well beyond my reading level, but I’m doing a lot better with it than last time I tried a few months ago.
Weights again this morning; I did the squats with just the bar, to practice form and make sure I went all the way down.