A Minor Setback

When I first began to take training somewhat seriously, it was easy to take any gains I was making for granted. Once I figured out all of the things I was doing wrong I was seemingly setting new 1 rep maxes every other week. The sad but universal truth for every training goal – strength, weight loss, endurance, etc. – is that the further along you are, the more difficult it is to make significant gains. One thing you don’t expect to happen is to go backwards though…

A month or two ago, I wrote about my gym finally getting standard (non-Smith style) bench equipment. Ironically, around that same time I started to experience some significant “losses” doing any type of chest press using dumbbells. Looking back at my training log or journal or whatever you want to call it, I was starting to get to the point where my dumbbell presses were getting pretty heavy, and I felt like even though I wasn’t that strong on the standard bench or even benching using the Smith machine I more than made up for it with the dumbbells. According to my log, I was at the point of doing 3 sets of 7 with 100 lb. dumbbells on the flat bench and 3 sets of 12 at 85 lb. on the incline. All of the sudden, and somewhat mysteriously, my strength on these exercises seemed to disappear. On the flat bench, I could barely even get the weights off my chest to even start a set with 100’s. Even doing 1 set on its own of between 8-10 reps with 90’s or 95’s was tough. Stranger still, I didn’t seem to have any such power outage on any non-dumbbell chest press exercise. The first time it happened, I just figured I was having an off day: didn’t sleep enough the night before, didn’t eat enough that day, energy was low for some reason, etc. The second time I tried (and failed), I was perplexed and frustrated. The third time, I was just plain ticked-off.

At first, I wasn’t sure what to think. I wondered if it had anything to do with the fact that I had recently dropped a few pounds. (A few months ago, I tipped the scales at 201 lb. I could’ve kept the weight on, but I had found myself playing more and more basketball, and I wanted to see if I could regain some quickness and explosiveness. Plus, I just wanted to see what I looked like a little more lean and toned-up. Right now, I’m somewhere in the 191-193 range.) The fact is that it’s only natural to lose a little bit of strength if you drop some weight. The other (and probably even more relevant factor) relates back to what I said before about playing more ball as of late. Even though I’ve gotten myself into better shape, playing more often has led to a few nagging injuries. Nothing major, but I might have slightly re-tweaked my old shoulder injury, and I did something to my left hand (specifically my index and middle fingers) that still hasn’t healed…I’m not sure if I jammed them or what, but combining that with my previous injuries to my pinky and ring fingers on the same hand (that means I at least still have a good thumb on that hand, boys and girls) makes it tough to grip and balance a weight. In theory I guess that those could account for a little loss in stability and explosive power that might go into dumbbell chest press exercises.

With the new gym equipment, I was planning on trying to use those pieces more now anyway (since I had been deprived of them for years) and use the dumbbells to supplement those exercises, but maybe this was just God’s way of saying, “Slow your roll.” Either way, hopefully some R&R from the heavier dumbbells and being lucky enough to not re-aggravate any of these injuries will allow me to use the 100’s again sometime in the not too distant future.