Injured

Yesterday, I loaded up my barbell with 225 pounds to do a warmup set of squats. I could tell there was something wrong because those squats felt less like a warmup and more like a new personal record. Nonetheless, I ignored the pain and did a set of three reps at 275 pounds. Then, I loaded the barbell up with 280 pounds. After one rep, I quit. The pain in my lower back was too much.

The past two weeks I've been ignoring the strain that I've felt in my lower back when I do squats. As the gap between my max squat and max deadlift started to shrink, I would feel some strain in my lower back when I would do my squats, and struggled to keep my form straight. At least one rep in any one of my sets would have me leaning forward too far, and I was doing a "good morning squat".

So, I'm injured. Nothing too serious, but I'm not doing any max lifts anytime soon.

Conventional wisdom says that you should rest when you have an injury, but sometimes conventional wisdom is just stupid. I'm taking the advice of Alan Thrall's trainer on this one.

Today, instead of just being immobile, I did a few sets of barbell squats with no weight added, and tossed in a set of good mornings (real good mornings, not squats with shitty form). I'll gradually increase my weight over the next few days.

Next week, instead of continuing on the Candito program, I'm going to spend a week working on increasing my higher rep maxes. This will help me work on my squat form while using a lower weight.

As if YouTube had been reading my mind, another Alan Thrall video discussing squat form popped up in my feed, and gave some good advice to unfuck my form. I'll be making sure to take that advice. Here's the video: