Isochain 6x6: Week 4

The week got off to a strong start, with a 291.2 lb max reading for the right side of Jefferson Lift, a 41 lb. change from Friday, and 59.8 lb max reading in the Shoulder Press, about a 10 lb. change from Friday despite raising the target load to 40lbs. Drag Curl max was 37 lbs., which is 2 lbs. down from Friday - which was more like what I expected with the target load raise to 28 lbs. The Jefferson Lift is an exercise I'm still exploring, searching for the foot and grip positioning that will make the most sense.

One thing I changed for the Shoulder Press was to straighten my legs, locking out my knees and hips. I thought that I could get higher force output by pushing with my legs, glutes, etc. and adding the power of my lower body to the force generated by my upper body muscles such as my shoulders and arms. I had been using this approach since I got the Isochain. Instead, straightening my legs, tucking in my tailbone, and squeezing my butt to make my legs and torso straight and tight as possible resulted in about a 10 lb. increase in force.

Since I'm new to the Jefferson Lift, I searched the Web to see how people are coaching this exercise. I eventually found this article on the USAWA site. USAWA organizes competitions in which you can compete in the Jefferson Lift and other "odd lifts" found in the USAWA rule book. The article mentions two ways the shoulders can be aligned with respect to the bar - perpendicular to the bar and parallel to the bar. Until Wednesday of this week, I had the Isochain bar neither parallel nor perpedicular - more like 45 degrees to the shoulders. I was also setting my feet about 90 degrees from one another with the working foot perpendicular to the bar. I then changed to the parallel foot alignmnent after rereading the Dave Dellanave article and reviewing the video in the article. Thus for the Wednesday session, I trained with the shoulders parallel to bar, parallel feet with the bar about 45 degrees to the feet, narrower grip, and the toes up to the edge of the plate. This combination did not result in a dramatic change of force output, but the likelihood of the knees, shoulders, or anything in the core (back, hips, etc.) being pulled out of aligment into pain felt greatly reduced. Under previous approaches, I always felt like my knees could collapse inwards if I didn't focus intensely on pulling them outwards. I did feel some soreness around the MCL part of the knees after some 6x6 sessions, which led me to pay more attention to keeping those knees flexing outwards.

For the Friday session, I tried raising the Shoulder Press target load to 44lbs. I did the first 6-sec. hold rep or two fine. By the 3rd rep, I lowered the load back to 42lbs. because I was unable to complete the 6-sec. hold. I also raised the target load for the Drag Curl and was able to do the full 6x6 set at a target load of 30lbs.