In the 4 months that I've trained at Catalyst, there have been two rounds of max testing, roughly 2 months apart (go figure).
The first round was daunting, since it began with a max effort back squat. The back squat is where I originally injured myself: during a warm-up set at Gold's, something in my back went wrong and my next several months became dedicated to questions like "will my left leg ever work normally?" and "how do I avoid having this happen again?" Frustratingly, the medical establishment was not at all helpful in providing treatment or education, and for quite some time I had no idea what the prognosis might be. Vicodin scrips were doled out freely, of course. U.S.A. #1! (I didn't fill them.)
...So I was a bit nervous about back squats, and doing them was the first leap of faith with my new trainer. I relearned them Olympic-lifter style, but until the end of the cycle I rarely if ever exceeded the fairly light weight that did me in.
Deadlifting on the other hand was a different kind of struggle. I have always been strong and confident with this lift. It's a very straightforward experience: you remove the weight from the floor and stand up, or you don't. Now, the main stress in this experience was that the weight was so very light compared to where I had been. Even some weights I'd managed relatively recently during gym false-starts were a fairly huge conditioning challenge in sets of any length. It was terribly humbling.
My numbers from that first testing week:
Back squat: 82kg (!)
Deadlift: 95kg
The second round of testing came just before Christmas. In this round of training, the three major movements were the front squat, overhead squat, and deadlift. I loved the overhead squat, on those occasions when my push-press went right it felt like the easiest and most fun thing I've ever done with a barbell. Front squats...not so much. I struggled to find a consistent way of doing them. I ditched incorrectly and sprained my hand. Weights that felt easy refused to go up. Body parts seemingly unrelated to the movement hurt. The Internet (by which I mean some random formula attributed to Polinquin) told me I should be able to move 69kg, but 60kg and higher was a festival of dumped bars. It was pretty much a disaster.
When overhead squat test day came, I had a good run of luck with the push-press up through 41kg or so, and then I failed 43kg, narrowly grazing the top of my head with the bar. I asked to try it again and it went up smoothly. My trainer was prepared to call it a day at 44kg, but I asked to try 45kg, confident that I could at least avoid dropping it on my head. The push-press went up like nothing and the squat was smooth with the slightest, fixable left-elbow buckling at the end. I win!
The day of front squat testing, I was super-sad for no good reason. The company Xmas party -- not the pigging-out opportunity you might imagine, thanks to my gluten issues -- took my usual gym time, so my session was pushed into mid-afternoon. I showed up at the gym wanting to call the whole thing off, or cry in the corner. Possibly both. Instead I did the work and surprised myself by a wide margin.
My numbers from the second testing week:
Deadlift: 106kg
Snatch-grip push-press + overhead squat: 45kg
Front squat: 70kg
There is another result that isn't captured in the numbers. Even as late as the first round of testing in October, an hour session was sometimes a struggle, and training two days in a row was an unspeakable idea. By the beginning of December, two days in a row was a good way to work around a conflict with my usual MWF plan, and by the end of December a one hour session no longer felt even remotely adequate. I started to contemplate two-a-days.
In the next round, the back squat returns, along with power jerks and power cleans. I'll also be continuing to work on front squats on my own time, working to recapture whatever easy trick of form made 70kg possible.
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