The first day is fantastic. You feel renewed, rejuvenated, angelic, like a bird. You feel like running, jumping, sprinting, laughing, and as if the world is once again with you, instead of on your shoulders. The weight feels like nothing, your muscles work quickly and efficiently. You rise easily from morning squats, throw your pulls through the roof, and the power lifts feel solid and lightning fast. You hit them hard. They feel like lightning, shooting overhead, explosive shots of force and velocity. The bar slams down over and over into the platform, and you are sure this week will be different. After all, you are the essence of the beast, a raging monster slamming the platform with wooden heel and flexing quads. A monster, pure strength contained in the human vile.
The second day, is a day of caution, and reassurance. You spend extra time stretching, rolling, massaging, icing, and popping supplements to ensure that those aches and pains can't touch you as the week wears on. You treat your muscles as tenderly and lovingly as you can, knowing they will respond to your treatment beneficially. Maybe they'll stay loose this week, you hope. Maybe they'll remain flexible and pain free as you slam them with heavy squats again and again. You still feel strong. The lifts still feel easy, though the fringes of fatigue are evident behind your eyes.
Shake it off buddy, you've still got four more days.
The third day, you wake in a haze, and you know hell's grasping claws are tickling your legs. You can feel the devil's fingernails graze your neck. Your legs don't seem sore as you roll them out, yet as you begin to stretch more deeply, the pain is there, only in small puddles at first, but potential lakes and rivers, ready to flow through joints and tendons alike. You try to drain them, open the floodgates, release that soreness out of your body before it's too late. Not hard, right? Just keep stretching, keep protein intake high, and pop those B-complex pills. Not bad, you got this, you got this.
But no-matter your attitude, your determination, your god given strength, as the sun rises, that first set of front squats kick you in the face. They feel so heavy it's as if your body is drained of everything. You're tripped off your pedastal, and all that pain you thought you'd finished off, held back, chained up, comes roaring back up through your legs, settling solidly in your knees. Oh god it's horrible. You struggle through, every rep gasping for air, desperately forcing your core to stay tight as a drum as the weight attempts to break your upright position. After the final rep, you nearly fall to your knees in grace, thankful to be alive.
That afternoon you sleep, deeply, if you're lucky.
Day three's second workout is the full lifts, which add insult to injury. Generally they don't go past 85%, and therefore aren't remarkably heavy, but you are so drained from those morning front squats that they feel vastly more massive than they should. Legs are bent, folded, accordions pumped in an aggressive polka. Tendons stretch across knees to maximum length, and despite their current warmth, the heart sinks in knowledge that your body will retaliate, freeze up, and become solid and unmoving. Upon dropping the last weight, you stretch, roll, stretch, massage, and ice in frantic determination.
But it's of no use, for as you crawl into bed that night, you can feel yourself turning into stone.
The second half of the week becomes one blur, a hazy streak on the front of your mind. It exists as a fog of pain and struggle, of pill popping, ice, and massage. You can barely walk, yet must squat every morning. Shooting pain rocks your tired body with every rep, and no bounce from the hole can be achieved without wincing, groaning, and nauseousness. You must creep into the depths of every squat, and power out with any muscle that doesn't hurt. Stay upright, stay strong, stay tight. God it hurts, it HURTS!
The afternoon is ice and sleep. B12 and protein. More ice, more stretching, ice, nap, try to hold your lids open. Eat and wince, groan and ice. And then it's time to lift again.
Time to lift.....again.
This time it's not as bad, as your legs are so numb and tired that the pain isn't as evident. You smear them with pain relieving creams, trying to break up those frozen muscles. The rocks your torso sits on. The slabs of granite preventing you from making those damn lifts, weights you threw through the ceiling earlier this week, just won't go above your head. You try harder, force yourself lower, pull the bar as high as you can. As high...as...you...can.
The last day is the trial. The test of your true composition, what you're made of, the deepest fibers of your being. When you cannot rise from your bed without coughing in pain, when all your muscles will NOT MOVE, when you are a brittle and hardened candle wick that has no internal strength, will not bend, refuses to light, and will shatter at the slightest touch. This is the day you will lift the heaviest. This is the day when plates are piled on top of each other and the bar wobbles freely up and down in your ripped palms. You squat to max, and despite the lightning pain, you yell and shout and rage against the bar, and you make the lift. You snatch to max, and despite the pain in your knees and your ankles, and your tired upper back, you make that lift too. And when finally the reps upon reps upon reps of clean and jerks are over, and you cry in agony as the heaviest weight possible for that particular day is thrust overhead, and you make THAT lift as well. Then you drop it. You drop them all. You fall over. You collapse in sweat and numbness.
And you wait for it to begin...again.
But it's of no use, for as you crawl into bed that night, you can feel yourself turning into stone.
The second half of the week becomes one blur, a hazy streak on the front of your mind. It exists as a fog of pain and struggle, of pill popping, ice, and massage. You can barely walk, yet must squat every morning. Shooting pain rocks your tired body with every rep, and no bounce from the hole can be achieved without wincing, groaning, and nauseousness. You must creep into the depths of every squat, and power out with any muscle that doesn't hurt. Stay upright, stay strong, stay tight. God it hurts, it HURTS!
The afternoon is ice and sleep. B12 and protein. More ice, more stretching, ice, nap, try to hold your lids open. Eat and wince, groan and ice. And then it's time to lift again.
Time to lift.....again.
This time it's not as bad, as your legs are so numb and tired that the pain isn't as evident. You smear them with pain relieving creams, trying to break up those frozen muscles. The rocks your torso sits on. The slabs of granite preventing you from making those damn lifts, weights you threw through the ceiling earlier this week, just won't go above your head. You try harder, force yourself lower, pull the bar as high as you can. As high...as...you...can.
The last day is the trial. The test of your true composition, what you're made of, the deepest fibers of your being. When you cannot rise from your bed without coughing in pain, when all your muscles will NOT MOVE, when you are a brittle and hardened candle wick that has no internal strength, will not bend, refuses to light, and will shatter at the slightest touch. This is the day you will lift the heaviest. This is the day when plates are piled on top of each other and the bar wobbles freely up and down in your ripped palms. You squat to max, and despite the lightning pain, you yell and shout and rage against the bar, and you make the lift. You snatch to max, and despite the pain in your knees and your ankles, and your tired upper back, you make that lift too. And when finally the reps upon reps upon reps of clean and jerks are over, and you cry in agony as the heaviest weight possible for that particular day is thrust overhead, and you make THAT lift as well. Then you drop it. You drop them all. You fall over. You collapse in sweat and numbness.
And you wait for it to begin...again.
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