July 19, 2009
“Damn, McLovin is squatting himself retarded!” I hear as I struggle to decide whether a ten or five pound plate one each side on top of 365 pounds makes 385 pounds. I’m so disoriented from finishing my previous set, but I laugh anyway while checking to make sure I didn’t misload the bar.
Friday was a second day of lower body, and we did Zercher squats for the first time. Simply put, it was brutal at first and when it was all over, I felt really tired. If you don’t know what a Zercher squat is, here are two pictures. You may or may not be able to see why it was one of the most painful exercises.
So as you can see, the bar is held in the crooks of your elbows. Alex and James are significantly bigger than me so they had no problem holding the bar in their elbows. For me, the metal was right on the bone and up to 95 pounds, I was able to withstand the pain. However, when we loaded it to 135 pounds, I felt a searing, burning pain through my right forearm and up to my thumb. I tried to just work through it, but I knew I couldn’t. It felt like the bar was pinning my nerves against my bone. Part of my thumb was already numb from using ~12,000 pipette tips between Thursday and Friday, but the numbness was all around my forearm, too.
Anyway, I decided to wear a long-sleeved shirt and roll up the sleeves to my elbows so there was some padding on the inside of my elbow. That helped immensely and I was able to build up to 235 pounds for a triple. Not too bad, considering I did 225 for triples onto a box on Monday.
I went to the field for work on Friday. One of the main reasons was that a postdoc’s plants had been purple several weeks ago, possibly due to phosphorus deficiency, so I was going to take pictures. But when we got there, his plants were totally fine and had “grown out of it.” Whatever the problem was before, it wasn’t an issue now.
Anyway, since I had my camera and Sara was going through the field, looking at other plants, I decided to take pictures of the field and some corn. So for an hour or so I just walked around taking pictures. Sara approved of this, of course, and said maybe we could use some of them for our web site. After that we collected 3 plates-worth of leaf tissue and went back to the lab.
So here are some of the pictures.
timemaverick said,
July 19, 2009 at 10:26 AM
Those squats seem really intense. I’m guessing that it requires decent upper body strength along with the fact that its a squat; hence being a hard exercise.
As always, your pictures are great. The corn field looks really great and seems pretty idyllic. I especially love the last picture where you can see the horizon so far away. It must be relaxing to look up from your tedious work and really enjoy the scenery.