DE "C&J"/RE Upright Row

Upper body warm-up

DE Kipless Hang "Clean and Jerk":
1x8 empty bar
1x3 55lbs
1x3 65lbs
8x3 75lbs

RE Upright Row:
3x12 85lbs

Horizontal Pull:
3x12 Inverted Row (Feet below chest)

Horizontal Push:
3x10 2x40lbs Incline DB Bench

Crazy-Awesome-BB-Finisher:
3x15 45lbs Strict curl
3x10 2x25 Hammer curl
1x15 Handstand push-ups
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Okay, in some ways, today hurt my pride. This is easily the "lightest weight" day I've ever had in the gym, period. Every exercise I picked, and every format of that exercise, there is no way I could've done heavier properly. But in another way, this has also been one of the most productive days in the gym ever. I chose my DE movement based on the fact that I didn't want to do a ballistic bench or an explosive pull-up. I remember that DeFranco often has athletes "clean and jerk" a log while using as minimal a kip from the hips as possible to make it purely an explosive arm exercise (or at least mostly). So then it cemented it: I would do that with the barbell (it would've been easier with the log cause of the neutral grip, tbh). So it's not actually a C&J, hence the quotation marks... But I've never seen this movement actually named before. DeFranco normally just calls it a C&J, but it's so obviously not... that bugs me to hell. Lol. So I think I'll jsut go and call it a Kipless C&J since that fits best. In any case, it is IMPOSSIBLE to do this movement heavy. The second you get remotely heavy, your arms just can't do it anymore without a kip. So the second that I started to feel myself kip a tiny bit, I stopped adding weight. By the end, I was giving little kips with each movement from fatigue, but it wasn't much at all.

This has easily become one of my favourite dynamic upper body exercises. Considering how low the volume was, it's surprising to me just how out of breath I got! My deltoids were feeling warm and my lungs were sucking in air. It takes a lot out of you. But more than that, you just feel powerful as crap.

The upright row, I may have been able to do heavier if I hadn't fried my deltoids with the C&J. So this was ridiculously light weight... But the point is rep effort, right? So I cranked out a high volume of reps and left it at that. The inverted rows, I intended to do until failure. I did not expect these to be as hard as they were. The first 6 or so are easy and you power through them... But having your legs higher than your torso means you're pulling most of your weight.. and you fatigue really quickly. And then there was incline bench.. nothign much to report htere.

Now, my finisher... I'm going to admit, the only reason that finisher is there is because I'm vain as shit and I want to look good naked. So I killed my biceps. And then I noticed that my deltoids are tiny compared to the rest of my arm (something that's always bugged me, tbh), and Mac's gym has been reorganized, giving me a fresh wall to use... So I did a set of HSPUs to failure on the wall. That sucked. Like a bitch. Deltoids fried+HSPUs=Deltoids want to kill you.

Good day. I need to do more high-volume days like this more often.