A Year Worth of Progress

Posted by Andrew On September - 14 - 2011

Well it is closing in on a year since I joing up at Varsity Gym with all manners of shoulder, back and flexability issues. At the beginning my shoulders were rounded forward, my hips were so tight that I could barely quarter squat and my shoulder flexability was bad enough to limit me overhead pressing, benching and squatting normally.

Andy and Chris looked at all these issues and decided that the best course of action would be to try and work around these problems to allow me to hit my big lifts but also incorporate assistance work that would try to rectify and target the problem areas over time. So to translate that into lifting terms I was forced to wide stance box squat with a safety bar to open up my hips, pin press to build up lockout power (also didn’t stress my already messed up shoulder) and overhead press with a football bar rather than the standard olympic barbell.

Football Bar

For assistance work I would do a lot of hip flexor stretching to try and open up my hips and allow more depth in squatting and for my rounded shoulders I was prescribed a healthy dose of rear delt flys. Now you may be thinking that there isn’t a lot of work there but when I say I was doing rear delt flys what I mean is I was doing upwards of 40 sets of flys varying from heavy sets of 5-8 to rep out sets of 15-20.

Fast forward to yesterday, the 13th of September, and it was destined to be a squat day. I had a word with Andy and we decided to try full squatting with the standard olympic barbell. To say I was apprehensive was an understatement, I was moving into unchartered territory! I am all for trying new things but I had never dreamed of being able to full squat with all my flexability issues, I had decided it was a fruitless endeavour to even humour the idea. Regardless I loaded up the bar and strapped on the lifting shoes.

Varsity Gym

To my surprise I was able to get into a full squat with a loaded bar on my back. The bar counterbalaned me and I was able to hit proper depth; all the times I tried bodyweight squatting I overbalanace and fall backwards. I managed to work up to a set of 105×5 with the last rep of that set being a proper grinder.

I guess the moral of the “story” is that to get results sometimes you have to go beyond the norm and try uncommon approaches to problem. I’ve already harped on about my rear fly days before but I can’t emphasise enough how much they helped my shoulder flexability and shoulder posture.

So all I can really say is a massive thanks to Andy and Chris at Varsity Gym and maybe someday soon I’ll be busting out the olympic lifts!

-Andrew

Note: If you fancy a challenge yourself why not get in touch with the guys at Varsity. They run the Varsity Challenge which is 20 0ne-on-one session for £50. You can contact them at 0141 554 8033 or info@thevarsitygym.com. Be warned though, once you get bitten by the bug there is no turning back!