Block 4 was supposed to be simple.
Six weeks of controlled strength progression. No grinders. No ego tests. Keep running separate, keep the old shoulder problem quiet, and build from there.
That was the plan.
The actual block was messier.
Kefalonia interrupted the middle of it. I had an eight-day break from training, which in practice disrupted almost two weeks of normal rhythm. Instead of pretending nothing happened, I came back to Week 3 loads, repeated that level, and only then continued through Weeks 4, 5 and 6.
Then, near the end, a new problem appeared in the groin.
So this was not a clean six-week progression.
It became something more useful: another training experiment where the numbers mattered, but the cost of producing them mattered more.
Legs: stronger than the plan
The clearest positive result was lower-body strength.
The Smith squat progression ended at 80 kg for roughly 3 sets of 7, still controlled and with reserve.
I do not treat 80 kg on a Smith machine as equivalent to an 80 kg barbell squat. The effective bar weight is unclear and the machine changes the movement. That is not the point.
The point is that the progression worked on the same machine under the same conditions.
The plate-loaded leg press was more dramatic.
The original plan topped out around 150-160 kg plus the sled.
I finished at 190 kg plus the sled, and it still felt easy enough that, with a healthy groin, I would probably have tested working sets somewhere around 220-240 kg.
I did not.
That distinction became important later.
My quads and glutes had more capacity than the surrounding tissue was willing to tolerate.
Hip thrust followed the same pattern. I finished with 130 kg for sets of 6, still with clear reserve.
Lower-body strength was not the problem in this block.
If anything, it progressed faster than expected.
Bulgarian split squats: stopped by the groin
Bulgarian split squats were never supposed to be a maximal lift in this block.
They were there for unilateral control and stability.
The final two weeks were removed completely because the groin started reacting badly.
That makes the result inconclusive, but the decision was easy.
An accessory movement does not get to negotiate with an injury.
Bench press: different numbers, same strength
Bench press was the disappointing part.
Before Kefalonia I had reached:
75 kg for 3 sets of 8.
After the break, I restarted at 70 kg and rebuilt gradually.
Later sessions moved through:
- 75 kg for around 7 reps
- 80 kg for 5 reps
- 85 kg for 3 reps at 0 RIR
- then 80 kg for only 4 reps in the following two back-off sets
At first this felt like a collapse.
It was not.
Using crude estimated 1RM calculations, the numbers are almost annoyingly consistent:
- 75 x 8 gives roughly 95 kg
- 80 x 5 gives roughly 93 kg
- 85 x 3 gives roughly 93-94 kg
The strength curve barely moved.
That is the real result.
I was not getting weaker. I was demonstrating roughly the same strength with different combinations of load and reps.
The original Week 6 target was 82.5-85 kg for 3 sets of 5 at RIR 2-3.
I did not come close to that.
So bench gets a zero.
Not failure in the dramatic sense. Not regression. Just no meaningful progress.
And the programming question is obvious now: too much of my bench work lived close to the ceiling.
Three sets of eight at 75 kg, then sets of five around 80 kg, then triples at 85 kg sounds like progression because the plates keep getting heavier.
But if all of those sets live around 80-90% of current 1RM and keep moving toward 0 RIR, I may simply be testing the same capacity repeatedly.
The next accumulation block needs more submaximal volume and less weekly demonstration of strength.
Back and arms: quiet progress
Back work moved well without needing much drama.
One-arm dumbbell rows reached 30 kg for sets of 8, cleanly.
Lat pulldown was stable at two large stack markers.
Wall handstand work also became smoother. Nothing spectacular happened, but the position feels more natural and controlled than it did at the start.
Biceps was another good result.
Hammer curls reached 18 kg for 3 sets of 8, strong enough that 20 kg now looks realistic.
More importantly, my elbows stopped hurting.
Earlier in the block they had started complaining. I reduced the load instead of forcing progression, and the problem settled.
That is probably a better result than adding another two kilograms while turning the elbow into the next project.
Core: progress, then an immediate warning
Core had been one of the best developments of the previous block, and it continued improving here.
Wall sits eventually reached 40 kg of external load.
Then the groin problem changed everything.
Hollow body work became one of the strongest immediate triggers. McGill curl-ups also started reproducing the pain.
That was interesting because running behaved differently.
Easy running could feel tolerable during the session, while fast running or repeats produced a much worse reaction the following day.
Core flexion did not wait until tomorrow.
Hollow body gave the answer immediately.
So I stopped it.
This is probably the clearest example in the block of why an exercise can be productive in general and still be completely wrong at a specific moment.
The groin changed the block
The first small signal appeared during deep leg press work.
At the time it felt trivial.
Then box jumps became increasingly strong - and increasingly suspicious. The explosive extension and drive could produce a feeling as if something was being pulled apart deep in the groin.
Fast running amplified the same problem.
Repeats were especially bad. The session itself could be manageable, but the next day the area could flare hard.
Easy running was different. Shortening the stride and placing the foot closer under the body reduced the discomfort. My cadence naturally increased when I did that.
The exact structure is still unclear, and I am not interested in pretending that a home diagnosis is certainty.
What is clear is the loading pattern.
The groin dislikes:
- explosive jumping,
- fast running and repeats,
- deep heavy leg press,
- Bulgarian split squats,
- hollow body work,
- and some forms of hard abdominal contraction.
So the final two weeks were no longer about completing the spreadsheet.
They were about removing the movements that kept provoking the same area.
That weakened the end of the block.
It was also the correct decision.
The surprising lesson: +1, 0, -1
This block gave me a simple way to think about training outcomes.
I used to think mostly in binary terms:
progress or no progress.
Now I see three states:
- +1 - performance improves and the body remains healthy
- 0 - performance does not improve, but nothing breaks
- -1 - performance does not improve and I also finish injured
There is another dangerous category hiding inside this model:
performance improves, but an injury develops.
That can look like +1 while it is happening.
It often is not.
The lower-body numbers in this block were excellent. Bench was flat. Back and arms moved well. But the groin problem affected running, leg training, core work, and exercise selection all at once.
That changes how the whole block should be scored.
A healthy zero is underrated.
If a lift does not improve but I finish the block healthy, I can change the program on Monday and continue.
If I finish injured, I first have to recover the ability to train normally.
That is not a philosophical distinction.
It is time.
What happens next
For the first time, I am going to deliberately run an active rest mesocycle instead of immediately beginning another accumulation phase.
The goal is not progression.
The goal is to keep moving while reducing training cost.
Roughly:
- lower-body machine work around 60% of current capacity,
- free squats around 50 kg if completely comfortable,
- no Bulgarian split squats,
- no box jumps,
- no deep heavy leg press,
- bench around 55-60 kg with large RIR,
- lighter rows and pulldowns,
- normal arm work only while the elbows stay quiet,
- plank, side plank and Pallof work instead of painful dynamic abdominal work.
No rep records.
No top sets.
No attempt to make active rest secretly become another accumulation block after ten days because I feel good.
That last part may be the hardest exercise.
The real result of Block 4
Block 4 did not fail.
It produced several clear findings.
My legs are substantially stronger than I thought.
Hip thrust still has room to move.
Back and biceps are progressing, and reducing load when the elbows complained actually worked.
Bench did not progress, and the likely programming problem is now much clearer.
The old front-delt / pec-delt junction problem was no longer the main limitation.
Unfortunately, a new groin problem replaced it and eventually became the dominant constraint.
So the biggest lesson is not about a specific exercise.
It is about the definition of a successful training block.
The goal is not to finish Week 6 with the largest possible number on the bar.
The goal is to create an adaptation that I can carry into Week 7, Week 10, and the next year.
Progress matters.
But progress that removes the ability to keep training has a very different price.
Sometimes zero is a perfectly respectable result.
Minus one is not.