Collegiate Nationals was Owen and my second meet together. Coming off an extremely successful 50kg PR meet in January, we had high hopes and lots of momentum rolling into Nationals. But, about 11 weeks out, Owen felt a pain in his hamstring during a last warmup on deadlift. It ended up being a partial tear, which is an injury he had dealt with in the past before we started working together. We simply were not able to put together the pieces well enough to come into the meet stronger than before, so about 4 weeks out we decided it was best to take our foot off the gas, focus on rehab into the meet, and take what was there on meet day.

Surprisingly, squat ended up being relatively strong on the day despite a significantly reduced workload. Owen was doing about half the work on squat at a significantly lower average intensity, and seems to have only lost about ~5kg of strength on the day relative to his meet in January, even with the injured hamstring. Although dealing with an injury through meet prep is not ideal, it definitely gave us some good data on how much Owen really needs to squat to maintain his strength.

Owen’s bench micro cycle is an ongoing experiment. We saw immediate and significant improvement in strength in the short term through increasing competition frequency, but have not been able to replicate that progress since his prep into his last meet. Owen is definitely unique in his sensitivity to heavier loads on bench, building into a heavy set seems to have to be treated more like someone else’s ramp into a heavy squat or deadlift with how quickly he accumulates upper body fatigue. And, with his reps being very slow on average, even with lighter weights, gauging difficulty can be a bit of a challenge. We went for a 2.5kg meet PR on his third attempt (which was grabbed a little early in my opinion), but was 2.5kg too much on the day. We have changed many things in his bench micro over the past several months, and what is seeming to work well is a decreased frequency to 3x per week, prescribed low percentage loads on non-primary sessions, and shifting intensity over to accessories like dips and cable/db press.

Expectedly, deadlift took the biggest hit from the hamstring tear. Most of prep was spent taking loads with less than 50% of his 1rm because that is what we were able to handle without re-aggravating his injury and keeping pain thresholds at a manageable level. All in all, this prep did not go how we wanted, but I am extremely impressed with Owen’s composure through it all. He spent zero time complaining, always committed to the plan, showed up on meet day and made weight, and left it all out on the platform. Extremely excited to get back to peak strength and blow past his old PR’s.