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Do you want a competitive advantage when you return to sports next school year? CrossFit is excellent training to prepare for back to school sports or simply to get in great shape over the summer.
Monday May 21st: 9:00am, 10:00am, 11:00am WODs.
May 17th WOD
Last modified on 2012-05-18 01:29:29 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
1-1-1-1-1 snatch
then…
row 300m
20 handstand push-ups
20 pull-ups
20 thrusters (95/65)
20 kettlebell snatches (1.5/1.0)
20 pistols
20 kettlebell swings
20 box jumps (24/20)
20 burpees
Throwing It All Away
Last modified on 2012-05-03 15:51:22 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
Over the last few years we have had a lot of people come through our gym doors. Some people came once, decided CrossFit wasn’t for them and never came back. Some decided that this was what they needed to do in order to change their life. We have watched the obese shed weight, we have watched the weak get strong, and we have watched the meek gain confidence. It is amazing to see people achieve their own incremental successes and have that drive them to achieve even more.
What I don’t understand though is why, sometimes, they throw it all away. Quit the gym. Stop exercising. Stop eating well. Get distracted. Give up. Once you have invested the time in yourself and done all (or most) of the work, why would you want to go back? Why would anyone want to be weak or overweight again? Why would you choose to feel lethargic and to get sick?
We all get busy. Work, family, friends, life in general; it can get hectic and stressful. Not focusing on exercise, nutrition and sleep is only going to compound those problems. It is always easier to do nothing but in the beginning something made you decide to walk through the gym doors and start on a new path. Something made you decide that you didn’t want to be obese or overweight anymore, that you didn’t want to be sick and tired all the time, that you wanted to be stronger, fitter and healthier. When you feel like giving up, or get off-track, take a look back and find the spark that got you here in the first place.
In the end, if you want to be strong and healthy, you have to do the work and you have to prioritize. You have to lift the weight and you have to give your body the right fuel. As your coaches, we love to see you succeed but we can’t do it for you. While we can show you how to get the results, it is your blood, sweat and tears that makes it happen.
Aristotle said “we are what we repeatedly do, excellence then is not an act but a habit”. No matter how busy, hectic or screwed up life gets, it is how we deal with it that matters. We can choose to focus on all the bad stuff and give up or we can focus on what matters and do that to the best of our ability. Give everything you have in the areas that count and forget about the stuff that doesn’t actually matter.
All things being equal
Last modified on 2012-04-12 17:14:11 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
We aim to be good at ten general physical skills. Cardio/respiratory endurance, Stamina, Strength, Flexibility, Power, Speed, Coordination, Agility, Balance and Accuracy are the 10 pillars of fitness. Each one is just as important as all of the others.
If you were to score yourself from 1 to 10 for each skill, how would you do? Would you have a nice straight line or would your line jump up and down constantly? Do you have one skill that stands out as being miles above all of the others? Do you have one that is way below? These skills create the base of your overall fitness. If the base isn’t solid then everything you stack on top of it won’t be either.
We all have areas that we are better in than others. That doesn’t mean that we should do those things more, it means we should focus our attention elsewhere. When you come in and you like every movement in the WOD, that isn’t necessarily the WOD that will give you the most benefit. We like the movements we are good at. We dislike the movements we are not good at. This is true of all of us. If you have a 600lb back squat and run a mile in 13:50, more back squats are not going to make you fitter.
We all have a tendency to focus on the sexy skills; strength, power and speed. That doesn’t make coordination, balance and agility any less important. All the power in the world won’t translate into a good squat clean if you can’t coordinate the movement or get under the bar fast enough. If you can power clean/snatch more than you can squat clean/snatch then you need to spend some time with those “other” skills.
Once you have enough flexibility, balance, coordination and agility to perform all of the movements safely and correctly, then you can worry about how much weight you can move and how quickly you can move it. As the old saying goes “power is nothing without control”.
The Road to Success
Last modified on 2012-04-04 12:47:03 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
In CrossFit the road to success is paved with intensity. Look back at your last few workouts and try to put an intensity percentage to them. Were you working at 60%, 75%, or 93%? Did you do the workout as prescribed or did you scale it? Did you do it in 6 minutes? Or 10? Or 28? If you look at the board and your time was way slower than all the other times on the board, perhaps scaling the workout in order to up the intensity would have been a better idea. That is not to say that there is no benefit in moving a lot of weight slowly, just that there is more benefit to moving a bit less weight much faster.
If at the end of your WOD you feel like you could do another workout, I guarantee your intensity wasn’t high enough. If at the end of your WOD you can taste your lungs in the back of your mouth you have done it right. Try to think back to when you started doing CrossFit. Remember how you felt when you finished those first few workouts? That is how you want to feel all the time. By constantly pushing yourself to the limit of what you can do, you will continue to make fast progress. When you scale back on the intensity and try to maintain a pace then we see those diminishing returns.
It doesn’t matter whether you want to go to the CrossFit Games, or whether you want to dominate on the ice in your rec league. It doesn’t matter whether you want to lose weight or to be able to keep up with your kids. Bring the intensity and you will get the results quickly. So who got the better workout, the guy who did it at Rx, the guy who scaled or the guy that DNF`d? The answer is the guy that tried the hardest, period.
