Power Step has been murder lately. They are running a sort of promotion at Sats Jakobsberg where if you show up on all the Thursday Power Step classes for a month and if you manage to increase the resistances on all of the strength based exercises, you can win a prize of some sort (which is probably not worth it, but whatever, it’s fun). It seems easy enough, incremental increases in resistance is a fundamental concept in weight training. The thing is, you also need to survive the cardio.

Somehow I managed to increase the resistances across the board for all of the exercises already on the first week of the challenge. Due to the small size of the Body Pump bars I had to jump from my previous personal best of 35kg to 40kg as you can’t fit more than 3 plates on each end of the bar. 40kg on the bar for bench press, split squats, deadlifts and bent-over rows doesn’t sound like much but when you consider the number of repetitions we do for each set (well beyond the endurance range) in these classes and the very short (5-10 seconds) breaks we get in between sets it does add up quite nicely. It also involves the typical Body Pump tempo changes where you might go quick-slow for eight reps and then go slow-slow for the next eight reps and so on. So currently I bench to failure, and everything else is very close to failure.

But like I said the limiting factor isn’t really the strength part, it’s the intervals after you’ve already pre-exhausted your muscles which destroys you.

Sats Power Step is interesting that way. If you look at the cardio part and the endurance based strength parts of the class separately it falls short of pretty much every other major group training class that Sats has to offer. I think this is one of the reasons people dismiss it in favor of Body Pump, Spinning and Core Pulse. Most trainees won’t load up enough weights on the bar on their first try and will consequently experience these two aspects of Power Step separately. It is only when you load up enough weights on the bar to work yourself to fatigue or even failure on the last reps of the strength sets and then immediately afterward do the intervals based cardio, that you realize how the two are connected.

However, my biggest issue right now, isn’t the increased weights or the cardio, or even the fact that this is that time of the year when it feels like my hay/pollen allergies cut my lung capacity in half. It’s actually grip strength.

I haven’t had issues with grip strength when pulling in the 6-12RM range up in the weight room so far but in Power Step class I’ve noticed that my grip starts to fail in the last sets of straight/stiff leg deadlifts and bent-over rows. At first I figured it had to do with the sweat making the bar too slippery but yesterdays class made it clear to me that it was in fact an issue with grip strength. When you feel that your fingers are slipping it’s very hard to focus on form so my bent over rows have been terrible lately. I don’t really know how to improve my grip strength though. I suppose I can try switching over to a hook grip to see if that helps.