^ Well, coming from you, I’ll believe it, but I still don’t believe it.
Iron,
I’ve actually seen similar things from even high school athletes. Makes me feel weak… real weak. Some people are just naturally ridiculously strong.
more wierd news - my record for pushups is 40 or 45 and that was in college. I couldn’t do more than 25 now. Specifically I have trouble stabilizing my shoulders and keeping them level, especially with the tightness I have in my upper back on the right side. Pushups don’t make it better, so I never really practiced them.
300 pounds for a 200 pound athlete on squat is not that unusual, especially for soccer players. I weigh about 145 and I rarely barbell squat (I opt for the leg press to protect my back), but when I have done it I have done well over 245. All those horse stances paid off!
It’s true that some people are just naturally strong at certain exercises. I can still do about 80-90 pushups, my max flat bench is about 240. However, I am particularly good at military (shoulder) press and incline bench - I can 6 rep 215 on both military and incline - I know people who flat bench considerably more than I do (and weigh more than I do, as well) but don’t do as well on the other two exercises. Similarly, while I can only pull down about 170 pounds, they can pull down over 200.
The way your body is balanced influences which excercises you are “natural” at quite a bit.
To increase your shoulder strength and stability, I would recommend doing what I call “rises” (there is probably a real term that I just don’t know). Basically just lift dumbbells from your waist to shoulder height, slowly, arm fully extended, directly in front of you, alternating right and left, or to the sides simultaneously. Doing this with 20 pound dumbbells regularly for a few months greatly increases the stability and strength of your shoulders. Before I started lifting regularly, I followed this routine to kind of “prep” my body for heavy weight training:
http://grantspad.blogspot.com/2006/03/thiagos-famous-home-work-out.html
It really gave me a good balance for my upper body strength which complemented the leg strength I got from my kung fu practice.
Even weirder… For the last 5 weeks, I haven’t so much as touched a weight (besides doing maybe 6 sets of kb snatches). Climbing season is fast approaching, so I’ve been focussing on bwe endurance type work. Since I’ve been doing circuits, I never did more than 15 dips at once. The other day I had one max set on dips and one on handstand push-ups. Now I haven’t done any overhead work in these 5 weeks either… no handstand push-ups even. I nailed 39 dips and 26 handstand push-ups. My endurance wasn’t close to that in either exercise 5 weeks ago.
Sometimes what it takes is a break
I don’t find that weird at all, FP.
Often, the body needs nothing more than a nice break before you come back and are stronger than before. Since starting weight training, I have taken up to three month breaks, where I would not lift weights at all and occasionally do some pushups and crunches. The first time I did this, before the break I struggled to bench 175 pounds. When I first got back to lifting, I was only putting up around 165. Two months after the break, I had exceeded 185. 6 months after that break, I broke 200 for the first time. Then I took another break, and when I got back, I started at around 185 and quickly moved to 225 within 4 months. The last time I took a break, I when I got back , I was still benching over 205, and in 4 months I had broken 260.
In contrast, before I started taking the breaks, I was lifting 6 days a week on a fast 3-day rotation for over an hour a day. I did this and improved from 125-165 rather quickly, but for nearly 10 months, I barely improved at all until I took the break and switched from 6 days to 4 days, and started practicing more kung fu (right around the first break).
Similarly, I broke my right wrist sparring, and for several months I couldn’t lift weights. I made up for it by learning to do one-armed pushups (I can do around 40 per set), and after my wrist had “healed” I started to improve dramatically in the weight room. The body needs to take breaks and you need to change up your program, otherwise the body has no incentive to get stronger.
How do you do your handstand pushups? I do mine against a wall or someone supporting my thighs. It is a pretty good exercise, but I find myself limited primarily by the blood rushing to my head. I definitely prefer shoulder presses with a barbell. I also do an exercise where I hold an L-sit for 5-10 seconds (lift your butt and legs off the ground, legs parallel) then tuck my legs, invert my body, and push up into a handstand. It’s quite a difficult exercise and really works all the shoulder fibers, but it’s difficult to maintain balance. I would suggest doing it as far away from walls and chairs and tables as possible. Carpet is good too.
I’m pretty familiar with strength training concepts and generally take a week off of all but light exercise every 9th or 12th week for such a reason. This goes way beyond any super-compensation I’ve ever seen from a period of inactivity. The only thing I can think of to explain is the sheer volume of dips and push-up variations done in my circuits has greatly increased my deltoid and tricep endurance more so than I was expecting.
I’ve overhead pressed 1.75x my bodyweight on a barbell, and during that time, hadnstand push-ups hadn’t felt as easy as they did the other day. I do my handstand push-ups against a wall although I can get a few free-handed on paralellettes. I do the exercise you are talking about with the L-sit more so when I am just playing around doing gymnastics stuff, which I do once a week or so. Try doing it with a straddle planche in between the L-sit and handstand.
Maybe you lost a lot of weight 
You’re right, tho, that doesn’t sound like typical supercompensation…
Ford - OH pressed 1.75 times your weight?
Just about. It was a jerk, so it’s not like I was calmly military pressing it.
nice progress. I remember you saying your jerk was @235, before you started training Oly seriously. Have you competed at all?
Don’t forget I’m still a relatively light guy. I made good gains but nothing astounding. I competed in local AAU meets and we had a few in-club meets too. It was fun, but not something that I’d consider doing seriously because I saw so many nasty injuries and could feel my body on the brink a few times. A very tough sport and I greatly respect the folks that work through the pain and injuries to excel in it.
If I had one lift to choose from for oly lifting it’d be the jerk. After a while, I felt that carry over to jumping and other explosive activities was great considering you have a bar on your shoulders that you are propelling overhead with as much explosive leg drive as possible. It is easier to isolate the explosive hip extension portion than the full lifts (and safer imo) and it’s easier on the body than a jump squat (and the full lifts). For athletic training, I think I’d add this in there with dynamic box squats since that combo would be much easier to teach and much safer for the athlete’s longevity.
Simplified versions of the lifts work well and are easiest to teach than the full list, as Ford mentioned. I would argue that clean pulls, high pulls(varying heights), and lifts from the hang work well too. For the hang lifts you can do them with a quick dip and reverse, from a static start, or off blocks. These would share the same benefits of very high power output whilst being easy to learn. Once weekly should be enough.
Well done, Rub.
On a related note, I took 3 weeks off lifting and training in February and ski toured in B.C. Lost about 10lb body weight, and lost a minimum of 20lb on all my lifts :(.
toby, you slacker.
on a similar note, i don’t have pullup access handy (have to go to the park), so my pullups suck. considering today’s crossfit workout today started with 100 pullups, that just plain blew. took about half an hour for the pullups, then 15 minutes for the 100 pushups, 100 situps, 100 squats. stupid pullups. i had to do 30 sets of 2-3 after the first sets of 4. :mad:
How did you break up the pullups? If I was going to do 100 I’d have to do 100 sets of 1 
Or maybe like 200 sets of .5. lol.
i was listening to soundgarden too loudly to remember exactly, but here’s my best guess. i can only do five of them when unworked, so …
5, 4, 4, 4, 4, then 30ish sets of 2 or 3. i spent about 5 minutes trying to learn kipping pullups, but i wound up sucking at it and i only had a set amount of time to finish the workout before i had to pick up my wife, so i bagged the kippers and finished it out with normal pullups.
i was planning to start with weighted dips today, but 100 is probably twice the number of pullups i’ve tried in any two-day period, so i’ma give what’s left of my lats a rest.