One Hundred and Eighty!

Training has been iffy the last few weeks, but I've been making a conscious effort to listen to my body, undershooting the weight on the bar when needed to reduce fatigue, and reaped the rewards with a 180kg 2 rep deadlift PR as an early Christmas present to myself!

I had been taking 2.5% off the target weight, fighting the temptation to just go for it, and although I anticipated another below-par week, things felt fast so actually ended up with a 2.5% increase on the target.

As 180kg (396lbs/28.3st) is a milestone lift (four 20kg plates on either side - well, not so much now as I've upgraded to 25kg plates), I compared this against my first 180kg deadlift from August 2020. That was a maxed-out effort at RPE 10 (no reps left in the tank), versus this at RPE 7 (3 reps in reserve) - both reps completed this time before the single rep from then.

Unfortunately, at the time I wasn't doing video tracking, so don't have metrics to compare, but the difference is still night and day, and a reminder that although progression on a week-by-week basis may not be obvious, a bigger picture view can often give a better reflection of where you are at - and hopefully feed into maintaining the consistency->progression cycle to drive results.