AHA!....snaking Deadlifts.

Today, I believe I had a bit of an "AHA!" moment.  I'm not sure where it came from, or how it actually occurred to me, but I may have resolved a bit of my knee issues.  My knees have been a bit on the sore side the last couple of months, the closest timeframe I can pinpoint the start of it is when I started working on breaking parallel.  I've been thinking that my knees are going wonky when we do heavy weighted squats (which, I know is true, and am trying to concentrate on), but we don't do super heavy squats THAT often, so the soreness really shouldn't be ongoing.  Well, today, in warmup (warmups have been 2 sets of 5 front squats/OH squat 30-45 lb bar depending on the day) I was 2 possibly 3 into my first set of 5, in my head, still wondering why the first set has been so uncomfortable/painful lately....and then, out of nowhere - I had a thought.  A brilliant thought.  I believe my issue is that somewhere along the lines of: while squatting on autopilot concentrating on weight, I've been starting the squat at the knee and not at the hip.  The last two I tried of this set were much better, didn't hurt.  I believe I have this puzzle solved, but next week will be the test.

Today were deadlifts - 1/1/1/1/1/1/1.  After getting almost no sleep last night (I'm chalking that up to the 1/2 can of Coke Zero that I had last night - thank you caffeine!), I wasn't really sure how I would do.  My PR for deadlift is 300 - but it was not a pretty 300 - pure snaking the whole way up.  I started today at 255. Good.  275. OK.  285 - the snake came back in a big way. 

At this point, I knew I wasn't going for any PR's.  I've decided that next time I hit 300 - it's going to be a pretty 300. End result: I need to work on making sure I've got the form down,  with weights that high, it's too easy to really hurt yourself, and that is not my goal.  So, I dropped back down to 275 - still a bit on the snakey side. Dropped again to 265 - this one was good.  Back to 270 - ok -with a hint o' snake.  Last rep I went back to the beginning at 255, and that was good.  So - I'll keep working on these, so that the next time I pull the 300, I can say it with pride as opposed to the  "yeah, but it wasn't pretty" caveat that I've been using.