Upkeep

Madcows is a pretty brutal routine in terms of its longevity and the toll it takes on your body. The routine is set up so that you set your starting 5RM low (10kg lower than usual), and building up over 4-5 weeks eventually overtake them by adding 2.5kg a week to your lifts. Yes it's more complicated than that but you can find the routine explained in depth in yesterday's post. 

Essentially, the point is that Madcows is a routine that doesn't really start to pay any sort of reward until at least a month in. This means that it is a long term routine (as far as linear progression is concerned, with the other long-term LP routines being Starting Strength, 5/3/1, GreySkulls LP, The Texas Method and a few other less known ones), with it lasting anywhere between 8-16 weeks or more. If you think about it, if you're on the program successfully for 8 weeks, you've exceeded your previous PRs (personal record) by around 10kg, so by week 16 you may have put 20kg on your squat and much the same on your other lifts. I'm aiming for around 15kg on my squat, so hopefully by the end I might be at around 125kgx3 or so. 

However, the fact is that Madcows is a more demanding program the deeper you get into it (the difference in intensity between week 1 of the program and week 10 is unfathomable) means that if you don't recover properly you are done and dusted. When this happens you start getting things like:

• injuries
• muscle tightness
• tendon & joint pain

As well as general fatigue, these are bad for your progression. What if I get to week 7, have put 5kg on my previous squat PR, and then have to quit while I'm on a roll because I've got lower back pain or even elbow tendonitis that makes squatting impossible? I would end up losing that momentum, as well as the foundation laid for sustainable gains from the first 4 weeks of the program. 

So, I've decided to put some effort into the upkeep of my body. Not just eating right (I am now having a shake with breakfast that is 45g Protein, 15g Carbs and 2g Fat, come at me), but also supplementing and doing active recovery. I'm taking my fish oil and magnesium, which definitely help the joint and muscle pains a lot, but I've also decided to do 2 days a week of 1/2 an hour of foam rolling. I do some stretches during lunchtime at work, but the active release from foam rolling will be the real helper. I did a nice session last night, rolling my hip flexors, quads, ITB, back, lats and pec minor (which is a big problem in terms of holding back my thoracic mobility), and I felt much better after doing it. 

Hopefully I can stay niggle free until I've made my progress on this routine, stay tuned for bigweights in week 6 of the program.