Rest Day, squats, and health care/politics

After a tough squat workout on Saturday and a bike ride on Sunday, Monday, it was more squats:

Back squats:
8x215
6x245
4x280
4x295

Front squats:
5x155
4x180
3x190
3x200

We are not even to the mid-point of our 12-week squat cycle, and we are already doing sets, while fatigued, at 90% of our pre-cycle one rep max.  To be honest, these workouts are taking a lot out of me.  Without the testosterone supplementation, I don't know how I'd be holding up.

After the squats on Monday, we did a descending ladder of overhead presses (not strict presses - push presses and push jerks were fine) and burpees.  After each burpee, we performed a lateral jump over our barbell.

I think the squat workouts would be tough enough on their own, but adding in more work makes it worse.

I took yesterday as a rest day.  Tonight, we have heavy barbell snatches and then a workout involving dumbbell snatches, med ball slams and some running.

For a while, I think I'm going to go by the CrossFit  "3 on-1 off" rule, so I'm not working out too many days in a row.  I'll make slight modifications so that I do the squat workouts, although I may do some of them on my own.


It's now been more than 3 weeks since my family and I lost our health insurance.  It's hard to believe that so many people are forced to live like this on a regular basis. We still have the option to pay thousands of dollars to retroactively continue the policy my wife had until the end of last month.  Instead, we spend each day hoping that we have no need at all to see a doctor or buy any medications.  And my wife is working very hard trying to find a new job, so that we can hopefully have decent insurance again.

Are "we", the citizens of the US, so much smarter than the rest of the world, that we can be the only "first world" country without a socialized medical system, and we can make it work?  I think that's a rhetorical question.  Somehow, our current system, where insurance is tied to a job, poverty or old age, is failing us badly.  The insured already pay for the uninsured.  We have the highest health care costs in the world and we have terrible outcomes.  It's really a screwed up system, but watching the political news every night, it's easy to see how we got here.  We continue to vote complete morons into positions of power.  And if they aren't complete morons, they are so ideologically rigid that they simple refuse to think if that thinking would mess with their pre-formed notions.

My 14 year old daughter told her mother and me last night that the politicians in the US scare her, and she wants to move to another country.  We had no reason to disagree with her.