“It is not enough that we do our best; sometimes we must do what is required.”

The Road to 100% RAW

So it's been a few months since putting myself to the grindstone, and there are results to share.

Squat: 315lbs

Bench: 255lbs

Deadlift: 400lbs

Bodyweight: 190lbs

This is after a few months of Texas Method programming, all without a belt or supportive gear. My goal is to break 350lbs of squat completely raw and hopefully lean out to fit into the 181lb weight class before summer. My deadlift hasn't moved because I haven't done singles for quite some time: I'm sticking to 5 reps which are pinned at a magical number I came up with while staring at Lon Kilgore's strength standard tables. Right now I'm doing 325 with a double overhand grip, which I'm actually quite pleased with.

Other Items of Note

My programming helped a girl get her first pull-ups. Joanna banged out some doubles before X-Mas, and was doing strict big-kid push-ups in the 10-rep range. Next step: handstand push-ups.

The methods we used are nothing extraordinary. 3 sets of max reps before our conditioning work, with loading if the max reps climbed above 12. The thing that I noticed helped the most was frequency. Doing push-ups and pull-ups once a week led to stalling numbers, but alternating between push and pull days got everything moving again. Our schedule ended up looking like this:

M Push-ups

W Pull-ups

F Handstand Push-ups

M Supine Ring Pull-ups

W Push-Ups

F Pull-Ups

etc.

Lately, I've been wondering if there are any ways to further refine the system. The decline in reps from the first set is what troubles me the most: I wonder if we're just training too much failure when we could be shrewdly doing more quality reps.