My performance of the Bridge seems to be improving. Last week, I would occasionally feel a sharp pain my shoulder because I got a little careless with how I was moving my hands back, to position them for the start of the movement. Now however, there is no more sharp pain. I used to struggle to hold the Bridge for more than 15 seconds. Now I can hold it for 20 seconds without too much effort.
I still have a lingering soreness in the inside of my left forearm. My guess is it was from the time I spent practicing the parts to the duet version "The Place Where I Found Love" on the Geoshred Pro app. The Geoshred practice itself was not the issue - rather, the issue was that I was holding the iPad with my left arm. I now practice that song with the iPad sitting on the desk, rather than being supported on my left forearm, but I still feel the soreness when I practice the Bicep Curl on the Isochain, hang from the pullup bar, and play my new electric mandolin or certain guitar. This soreness was a factor in my decision to abandon ring training - for now - in favor of Isochain training. So this week I decided to eliminate another possible factor in this persistent soreness, by replacing the Bicep Curl with Chest Press. I also started training my forearm extensors with the Ironmind Expand Your Hands bands that I bought years ago but have neglected.
It took more time than I would have liked to figure out a good bar height and hand positioning for the Chest Press. An overhand grip with a straight wrist gets more uncomfortable below a certain height. I eventually settled on a bar height that seemed to work with an underhand grip, with the hands nearly at the ends of the bar. It's a good height for me to feel like I can use chest muscles as the dominant movers for the Chest Press, rather than the shoulder muscles. I used the One Rep Max Protocol from the Ultimate Isometrics Manual to establish my 1-rep max value for the Chest Press. I did the 3 reps as specified by the protocol. It was interesting to see that the max value reported by the Isochain go up with each rep. However, I followed the protocol and took an average of my 3 scores to set my official 1-rep max to 56.4 lbs instead of 60 lbs which was my score on the 3rd rep. I seem to recall from Power To The People that a suggested starting load for a load cycle is 70% of 1-rep max so for the next session I'll train the Chest Press at a load of 40lbs (rounded up from 39.48).
Because of my frustration at the amount of time and effort it took to establish the bar height and hand positioning for the first session practicing Chest Press, I did an all-out max effort on my last rep of my Shoulder Press working set. It was around the low 70s.
I finished the week feeling stronger in the Deadlift and Shoulder Press. I can still improve my skill in sustaining the target load for 6 seconds. I still heard the timer reset whenever my force against the chain dropped below the target. I also still haven't found the best possible groove, set up by hand placement, arm positioning, etc. for either movement. But I think I'm closer to finding that groove than I was at the start of the week.
For the Chest Press, I still have to figure out if underhand or overhand grip is better. For the Wednesday session, I went with underhand, which felt more comfortable at the bar height that I tagged, using a ziptie tag on the chain link, for this drill. But during the Friday session, I found that I could get a more comfortable overhand grip by allowing the elbows to rest further away from the armpits and pulling the elbows behind the torso. The manual says to train with the bar up against the sternum, but I don't think this is literally possible. I think however the manual is correct about direct force to the bar upwards and away, so that the chain would be on a diagonal, instead of perfectly vertical.
Also I misread the instructions for the Drill-Specific Warmup. It's only one rep per intensity level, not 2. The manual says the total reps for the warmup should be 2-4. Only 2 reps if you opt to skip the easiest and hardest intensity reps. 4 if you do all 4 levels.
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