Desk work is relevant here. Six hours of typing plus loaded wrist extension in the evening is a fair amount of total wrist stress. The training is probably fine and the day job is what makes it linger.
Tara Boone
@treadmill_tara
Five dark months a year means most of my mileage is indoors. Incline settings, boredom management, and how treadmill pace translates outside.
The average holding period point is genuinely reframing. I was comparing my total against the index's annual return like they were the same thing.
It's percentage based at 0.25% plus fund fees around 0.1%, so about 0.35% total. Sounds like that's not the issue.
That's the usual jump. Now hold there for a few weeks before you start chasing failure again — most people immediately go back to grinding and stall at 7 instead of 4.
Stop training to failure every set. That's almost certainly the whole problem — at 4 reps max, going to failure means your total quality volume per session is nine or ten reps, and most of those are grindy bad reps that fatigue you without building much.
Switch to greasing the groove style: sets of 2 (half your max), lots of them, spread through the day or across the session with 2-3 minutes rest. Aim for 25-30 total reps in a session, all of them fast and clean. Do that four or five days a week for three weeks and retest. Almost everyone stuck in the 3-5 range breaks out with this.
The reason it works is that at low rep maxes you're limited by neural efficiency and connective tissue readiness far more than by muscle size, and both respond to frequency rather than to intensity.
This is underrated. My freestanding time doubled in a fortnight after I stopped being scared of falling, and nothing about my strength changed.
Filmed it and yeah, the shoulders visibly roll forward around the point where it starts hurting.
Second this. Also put a towel between the bar and the frame regardless — the marks otherwise are very obvious at move-out.