Bill Cammack

in: 164.4
out: 164.6

Day 03 was the first semi-”let me at ‘em” day. Days 01 and 02 were like “I don’t wanna go, but I have to get started sometime”.

I started today on the weights instead of the bag for two reasons… 1) I was getting fatigued ahead of time and wasn’t able to judge where I was with the actual weights, compared to what I used to push, and 2) Since I primarily stand “righty” when I’m striking, I was excessively fatiguing my left arm, which meant that once I got to dumbbell curls, my left failed way before my right.

You don’t want that, because you have to stop working on the stronger side when the weaker side fatigues so that you don’t maintain the right side’s superiority. Ultimately, you want both arms to ‘fail’ at the same weight and the same number of reps.

It’s also important because when you do exercises with bars, like wide-grip pulldowns, for instance (or even leg extensions or leg curls where you use both legs at the same time), if one side’s weaker, you end up compensating with the stronger arm.

This would seem to be a good thing, like the stronger arm is helping the weaker arm to push/pull more weight, as if you were being ‘spotted’ by someone. What it actually does is make the stronger arm work MORE, since the weaker arm already failed and is kind of just there “fakin’ the funk”.

Fakin’ The Funk

The obvious problem with this is that one side remains weaker and overworked the entire time, leading to UNDERworking your strong side, waiting for the weak side to catch up. I decided to avoid that this time and go for the weights first.

It wasn’t so bad this time. I probably pushed 1/2 of what I’m used to. That’s good for day 03 / first week back. I walked in @ 164.4, another Guinness World Record weight for The Kid, haha. My metabolism is (according to Steve… WAS :/ ) incredibly high, to the tune of I need to consume ~5,000 calories/day in order to gain weight.

Obviously, the problem with that is that I’d have to spend A LOT of time eating and A LOT of time resting in order to maintain weight. Especially back in the day, when we used to hit Roseland or Palladium or Underground and I’d drop four (4) pounds in one evening, dancing hahaha, that was pretty much a drag. :/

Anyway… I figure the extra .2 lbs was from the water I drank while I was there. I feel good right now… Way better than I felt after days 01 and 02. Muscle Memory works in stages. The first stage is “I don’t want to do this”. The second stage is each individual group getting its wits back. The third stage is the groups starting to work together… biceps working with lats on pulldowns. triceps working with chest on dips or pressdowns, etc. The fourth stage is unity… The whole system working as one machine.

I’m currently in stage 2. The wrong muscles are failing on the exercises. My shoulders are failing on the “dip machine”, when it’s supposed to affect my triceps. My biceps are failing on the wide-grip pulldowns, when it’s supposed to be my lats. At some point, the weak links are going to come online, and I’ll progressively get a lot more out of my workouts.

Current prediction of max weight = 170. I still don’t believe my system’s going to sustain any more weight than that without sweating it all away.

I still haven’t prepped the day 01 video and haven’t even looked at the day 02 video, so I’ll repost a video from July, 2007, back in the 155 days:

--
Follow Bill on Google+