This week represents the end of the transition period in my 8 month plan for a trip to the Bugaboos in August of this year. I altered my schedule a bit to better line up with James so ended up adding a big week in last week and then took a rest week this week. The rest week was harder than I thought it would be – James is out climbing what is likely the last ice of the season right this very moment while I’m sitting in my apartment. The idea is to give your body some time to recover from the previous work, so hopefully the rest period does what it’s supposed to do. I definitely suffer from FOMO so staying home is tough!

Rather than type a long post detailing what the last four weeks looked like I thought I would lay it out in calendar form so you can see it all at once.

The focus of the past month has been the strength sessions we’ve been putting in with the help of our friends at Crossfit Ironstone. Having a great gym to work out in has resulted in the most focused and consistent strength work I’ve put in for years, if not a decade. I’m stoked for the next two months there.

Our approach is four exercises per session roughly split into two upper body and two lower. We aim for consistent resistance for each exercise through five sets of five reps with three minutes of rest between each set.

Here’s the month:

The abbreviations should be straight forward. OHP is overhead press, DL is deadlift, DP is dips, WD is weighted dips, etc. The first two weeks look sloppier because I was fine tuning the weight range I needed to work in in order to hit the format of five sets of five reps we’re using. Now that I have that worked out, each session is more dialed in. I generally will add ~10lbs the following week if I’m able to comfortably complete the 5×5 at a particular weight. For example, on March 9 I was able to deadlift 225lbs for five sets of five reps comfortably. On March 19 I bumped it up to 245 and was still able to do 245 for 5×5, so will likely move up to 265 next time. I take this approach for all lifts in the program. It’s also why recording the data for every session is important – I wouldn’t be able to keep this straight without keeping records. Pat over at Ironstone has a good blog series that goes into more detail on the progressive overload method so you can check it out if you’re interested in learning more.

Next month is more of the same, but my weekly volume targets are up in the 9-11hr a week range so I’m going to have to start spending more time on the bike in the gym. I’d prefer to run outdoors but the city is still clearing out from 3 feet of snow and I tend to be protectionist of my Faberge egg ankles so I’m staying indoors.

Happy weekending

Matt