Here’s what has happened…
I went back to gym after a five day forced break, and did a class then some cardio. During the cardio I saw my trainer, so I asked him why I was doing rack pulls. He said most people when they train want to get lean, even if they want to get big, they don’t want to get big and fat. He said most of his programs are based on increasing the basal metabolic rate, so that you burn more calories all the time. He said something like rack pulls work different parts of your body in one exercise…I explained to him what happened the previous time I had tried to do them, and what the trainer Steve had said. My trainer was pretty defensive about rack pulls, and perhaps a little disappointed/annoyed at what Steve had told me. He askedme "What else didd he say to you?" He said “I’ll go and talk to Paul about it now”, and he went and talked to Paul. Then he didn’t come back and tell me anything else.
So the next day was my day to do chest, and rack pulls are right after my warm up. I got through the first two sets, couldn’t lift the third, dropped the weight until I could lift it (which was equal to the second and fourth sets) and managed to do six pretty average reps. I obviously wasn’t doing them properly and by the end I hurt my lower back a bit. We could all see it coming.
At the end of my workout one of the female trainers asked me how I went and I told her what happened. She said my trainer really likes rack pulls at the moment. Sometimes trainers will find an exercise that they like and give it to everyone. She said she’d just started doing them, and sometimes her back felt kind of jarred (doesn’t really sound good to me…), but not like it hurt bending and stuff. I decided that was my kind of hurt, and she said it might be best to take them out of my program for a while. Then along came one of the trainers who also owns the gym and she said to him “Aidan’s given Spunky rack pulls and she’s hurt her back” and he said straight away “Take them out. I’ll talk to Aidan”. He gave me a stretch which helped my back quite a lot.
The lesson I learnt is, if you whinge to enough people you get what you want.
The next day was leg day, and everything was a bit hard, probably because my back wasn’t 100%. I had to drop my deadlifts my 10kilos, and it kind of hurt but I got through them in decent form, but I don’t think I was getting as low as before. At the end of my workout Paul saw me writing comments on my program card and asked what I was writing. It was about my deadlifts. He said “Okay, we’d better take your deadlifts out”. I said “But aren’t they meant to be really good for me?” and he replied “It’s all meant to be good for you. It’s all relative. (?) If you’re hurting your back we’ll take them out and you can do something else.”
I said “Won’t my back be better in a couple of days and then they’ll be okay?” and he said “If you’re feeling your back we’ll take them out for a couple of weeks and then you can go back and put more weight on your deadlifts.”
So now I am doing assisted chins with a wide grip instead of rack pulls, and medicine ball hammys instead of deadlifts. Ooh, I was feeling my hamstrings today.
Sorry that was really long. I could have just written “I’m not doing them anymore”. Haha
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