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Meet Recap: Joel appeared from the shadows after a 3 year hiatus to compete at the USAPL California State Championships, which if you are going to come back after 3 years, that was a pretty darn good meet to do it at! Joel was able to finish the day with a 402lb. squat, 347lb. bench press, and a 479lb. deadlift to finish with a small PR total of 1229lbs! It’s been a long road back to this point, as prior to working with Joel he had sustained a pretty significant knee injury, that he then re-injured during a hiking accident. For a good while, it was hit or miss on if we could sustain multiple weeks of consistent lower body training without his knee swelling up. And it didn’t act like a tissue based issue, where we could load manage and adapt through progressively increased volume and stress. Seemingly at random times it would swell up, have to take 2 weeks or so off to let the inflammation die down, and was a bit of a mystery. We eventually shifted to a very minimalist approach, where Joel only squats once a week for 3 sets, deadlifts once a week for 4 sets, and then on the other lower body day does more machine based accessory work. This setup really seemed to do the trick, as Joel’s knee only tolerated so much barbell based squatting, and being able to provide more accessory based work to fill the volume gap allowed us to push squat on that one day a week while still getting the needed workload to create enough stress and adaptations. And we really only figured this out about 4 months out from the meet, and Joel was able to go from not squatting over I believe 365lbs consistently in over a year to hitting 400+ multiple times during that final block. So I am excited to continue with this setup and see where it takes us!
Division: Open
Weight Class: 125kg
Squat: 402lbs.
Bench: 347lbs.
Deadlift: 479lbs.
Total: 1229lbs.
Coach: Steve
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