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Soothing music and a handful of new PRs
by Scott Bird | March 3, 2006
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After nearly 4 years I still haven’t adjusted to the Scottish weather. This morning on leaving the house I debated whether or not a t-shirt and jeans would be enough. 10 minutes later it was snowing.
By mid-afternoon the snow had all but disappeared, the sun was back out in force and I was on my way to the garage for another squat/dead session. There was one small (but significant) difference between this and last Saturday’s session - the accompanying music. Having read Matt Furey’s blog this morning (can’t stand his methods, but some of the information’s great), I decided to try working out to soothing, rather than stimulating music. The general idea being to relax, reduce your heartrate, breathe deeper and generally perform better.
The music of choice was a collection of Bach cello suites played by Yo-Yo Ma. Relaxing it certainly was - and yes it did change things. A few observations :
- I quickly lost track of time. The feeling was one of methodically working through pre-planned sets/reps, rather than thinking in short bursts between sets.
- I didn’t feel at all distracted by the music - it was all instrumental so there was no tendency to want to sing along to it (always a frightening experience for the neighbours), and I was able to focus completely on the exercises themselves.
- There were no highs and lows throughout the workout - attempting a PR was no different to warming up.
Overall, being somewhat more relaxed from the beginning of the session seemed to have a positive affect on endurance. Very positive, as there were several new PRs - despite only repeating a workout pattern from less than a week ago.
Squat
2×30@20/44 (was considering ultra-high reps here, but my fingers went numb from just 30)
2×20@40/88
Bottom Squat
2×20@60/132
2×15@80/176
2×5@100
Rack pull (6 holes showing, just above knees)
2×20@60/132
2×20@100/225
2×10@140/308
2×5@170/374
5@182.5/401.5
1@200/440
To put the above rack pulls into perspective, last Saturday I was repping at 160/352. Last April I managed a single at 180/396 from slightly lower pins (hence the set at 182.5). Finally holding 200 felt great.
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Comments
Interesting musical twist. As much as I like classical music, I’m pretty sure I’d fall asleep to it during a workout… Congratulations on the pin pull PR! Time to see if it has translated into a bigger deadlift off the floor soon…?
Posted by: Kris | March 3, 2006 11:00 PM
Sorry for the double post again. The comment page was unresponsive for about two minutes and no comment showed up so I reloaded. Seems the first one got through as well. Are you running at the top end of your server resources? The site itself seems reasonably snappy, but the MySQL operations are really slow.
Posted by: Kris | March 3, 2006 11:05 PM
Haha! I’ve lived in Scotland all my life and i still haven’t gotten use to the weather - I hate it!
Congrats on the rack deads.
Rob
Posted by: Robert Forbes | March 3, 2006 11:06 PM
Nice lifting Scott. good to see that the deadlifting weight is coming around.
Posted by: Chris D. | March 3, 2006 11:29 PM
Thanks Rob. I actually like the weather here - it’s just very, very strange.
Kris, I’m not sure why things are slowing down. I’ve been experiencing unusually high bandwidth and a flood of comment spam (which hasn’t appeared on this site yet, but each comment forces a rebuild of any sites it does hit); but in a particularly poor piece of timing my service provider is currently doing maintenance work on cables in the area. The DSL connection’s been up and down randomly for days, so it’s hard to do any lengthy tests.
I think I might move some of the older archives into a new home - that should reduce rebuild times. Another move is to consolidate the feeds a bit - currently I’m generating both Atom and RSS 2.0 feeds for posts, plus an RDF feed for comments, and yet another feed for site visitors.
Any other suggestions are more than welcome.
Posted by: Scott | March 3, 2006 11:31 PM
suggestions…go with word press. :)
Posted by: Chris D. | March 3, 2006 11:33 PM
Wordpress? Does that handle rebuilding of large sites any better? Haven’t actually seen it used for anything big.
Posted by: Scott | March 3, 2006 11:48 PM
Aaagh - it’s spam alright. The other stuff will certainly help rebuilds in the future, but for now - a bit of cleaning to do.
Posted by: Scott | March 4, 2006 12:18 AM
Hi Scott, continue to be impressed by the bottom squats.
As we discussed in email, I don’t think you need more than one feed flavor.
IMHO, wordpress won’t really help the rebuild. One of your issues is your extensive use of dynamic pages (i.e., everything is PHP). Wordpress is PHP, so same difference.
Are you using MT 3.2? That will do a lot of spam blocking, and only the pages that get comments will rebuild.
Posted by: Bud Gibson | March 4, 2006 2:41 AM
As Bud says, Wordpress is entirely dynamic and grabs every page hit from MySQL using PHP. You have much less overhead with the statically cached HTML pages of Movable Type although the rebuild process might be intensive. If you are on a shared server, my guess is that the host is started to get overloaded and there’s not much you can do about it. I guess you have no way of seeing the RAM status of the host as a whole?
Posted by: Kris | March 4, 2006 6:13 AM
One more thing: I have found that the best way to block comment spam is to force a preview of the content before being able to submit. Haven’t had a single spam comment come through after I implemented that. There will be a day when the spam bots will be able to figure that one out, but for now it is fool-proof plus makes the commenter check his comment a bit more carefully. I also like preview since you can verify that whatever HTML tags you entered render as expected.
Posted by: Kris | March 4, 2006 6:16 AM
Thanks Bud, Kris.
I actually haven’t been getting much comment spam (hardly any since upgrading to 3.2). It’s mostly been refferer spam (I’ve now stemmed the tide a little) and trackback spam.
It’s a shared server, so you’re right Kris - there’s a limit to what I can see of the server’s resources. I can’t even tell what other sites are alongside mine.
I think, however, I’ll take up Kris’ suggestion and add implement comment previewing. Hopefully that will help get the ‘hardly any’ down to none. I’ll also do the abovementioned feed consolidation and archiving of older posts.
Posted by: Scott | March 4, 2006 9:00 AM
Did you flip off the bar like Andy Bolton after that 440 PR? That’s great. I’m in agreement with you on the music choice: sometimes, you just want to be in that zone a lot less perturbed.
Posted by: Alberto Caraballo | March 5, 2006 5:55 AM
Thanks Alberto. Nah, far too calm for that. Now I know that my grip can handle that sort of weight, I’m looking forward to the next max cycle (and hopefully a few PRs).
Interestingly, I went straight back to the usual heavy music as soon as I’d finished the workout. But I do think the change made a massive difference.
Posted by: Scott | March 5, 2006 3:48 PM
Nice job on the rack pulls. However, I think I want music that gets me emotional and charges my heart up. What works probably varies from lifter to lifter.
Posted by: Jon | March 5, 2006 9:56 PM
Jon, I’ve always taken that road in the past (apart from a few silent sessions). The main question is one of endurance - can you keep the emotional charge high for the entire duration of the workout? I’m fine for an hour or so, but I start to slow down a bit after that.
Posted by: Scott | March 5, 2006 10:43 PM
Get a hold of the God of War soundtrack off limewire, or bit torrent, that sort of music sets me on fire, it’s not heavy but it seems to work well.
Posted by: carpediemcat | April 8, 2007 12:58 AM
Will check it out.
Posted by: Scott | April 8, 2007 1:19 AM