Category: CrossFit

Internet failures, fitness edition

I’ve been thwarted – thwarted! – on a few occasions as of late with my internet research. This is a problem, because when I get what I want right away, it’s research, but if I don’t, then I start hunting for it, and there’s a very fine line between that and procrastination.

Problem the first: I was working with my trainer on low bar back squats, but had a really hard time getting into the starting position. They’re supposed to be a bit uncomfortable, but some of my reps were mostly working trying to keep the bar in place, and my legs got a break.

YouTube is usually great for instructional stuff, but all I could find were a mix of demos of the squat in progress and comparisons between high and low bar squats, plus some “hey, look at me squatting 400 pounds” videos (and don’t get me wrong, if I could squat 400 pounds I’d post it too.)

The texternet – I just made that up, please don’t let it be a thing but the non-video, non-picture part of the internet. Monomedia? Anyway, the texternet gave me a bit more to go on, minus pictures, and confirmed my suspicions: practice plus flexibility work will equal better squats, and there’s no magic cure this time around. For those of you looking for help with your low bar squats, this is the best I could come up with as of today.

Problem the second: On the way home last night I spotted a guy in a blue shirt with yellow lettering that said “Thrusters Suck.” A thruster is a combination of a squat and an overhead press:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OhqIGYqELk

And they suck. More than burpees. But mostly I liked the shirt because it was a secret code shirt, where most people won’t even know what it’s about.

But do you think I could find it online? Is it possible that people still make shirts and sell them in… stores? Weird. Anyway, that led to a great deal of procrastination, thanks to Google Images and “crossfit shirts” (current favourite: “seems so short but sucks so quick.”

If the internet’s going to keep sucking time from me like this, I need to find a way to surf while I’m on the long runs. And at the speeds I’m going lately, that might actually be relatively safe, as long as I avoid trap doors…

 

3 kinds of burpees

Six months ago, I didn’t know what a burpee was.  Good times.

Generally I see these added in as part of a larger set of exercises (like in a WOD) but they also show up as “penalty” phases in various obstacle-style races, where if you can’t do the challenge you do burpees instead.  Here’s the video:

Basic burpees

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqM9hKrP9Hc

I couldn’t find a better example than this one, but one of the tips my trainer gave me for high volume burpee work is to hinge at the hip on the way up – don’t do a full push-up, just get your shoulders up, and then you can snap the hips forward to get you into the jump position.  It depends on what your goals are, of course – full push-ups will get you a better arm workout, but then things get harder later.  In my opinion, the jump is the deadly part.  Which brings us to the variants:

Bar-facing burpees

You can make this a lot harder by going straight into the jump-over part, or you can get up, jump, turn, and repeat.  Oh, and I can’t resist this one – no way can these kids beat me!

Lateral burpees

In this variant, you’re using a bar (or some other barrier) but instead of facing the bar like in the previous example, you stay parallel to it and jump sideways over it.  I’m not used to lateral jumps, so I found this one really challenging on my legs and lungs.  I picked a video with overhead squats in there too just because I love overhead squats so much more than burpees, but also to highlight how easy it is to mix them into a workout.

You can do a workout of just burpees (this year’s CrossFit Open had a 7 minute AMRAP that I want to retry, except for the big part of my brain that doesn’t want to do it,) and they’re also common in “every minute on the minute” style WODS, where you either stop what you’re doing every minute to do some, or you do a single rep (say a deadlift or snatch,) some burpees, and then wait out the minute before repeating.

I hate these things, but that’s probably a sign I need to do more of them…

The day I met Cindy

I was really looking forward to today: my first meeting with Cindy, one of the CrossFit ladies:

  • 5 pullups
  • 10 pushups
  • 15 air squats

20 minute[abbr title=”As Many Rounds As Possible”]AMRAP[/abbr].

I’m pretty sure I lost sleep over this one – my first all-bodyweight WOD!  I’m at the point where I’m familiar enough with most of the exercises and know my strengths and weaknesses, so I’ve started to strategize a little.  The next phase will be once I’ve gotten a few more of the “standard WODs” under my belt so I can have actual experience of how things feel at different points in the workout, but for now all I can do is visualize.

Of course, the visualization would have worked a lot better if I hadn’t somehow gotten 3 pullups in my head instead of the prescribed 5.  I used a band for assistance, but those extra two take me over the fatigue line a lot faster.

So I had a bit of a notion of adding a small rest phase between sets to pace myself out, but that got taken care of during the pullups, since if I can’t lift myself over the bar, it’s a null rep, so I needed to wait in between 3-5 after the third round or so.

There’s not a lot I would (or could) do differently on this one.  It’s a great benchmark workout for overall fitness, but other than improving overall conditioning and my strength/weight ratio, which just takes focused effort, I’d go out pretty much the same next time.

The only minor tweak would be my rest position if/when the pushups fail out.  In the first few cases, I was just laying prone, with my hands still in position, which kept my arms and chest semi-engaged and made me start from a dead stop.  Later in the workout I switched to more of a cat stretch, on my knees but with my hands still in position, and I found I was able to go from banging out singles to doing 3-4 at a time.

I’ve found that hand-release pushups have been a big help with my overall pushup, so basically I’m going to keep doing those, continue my training, and next time I want to aim for 15 rounds (today was 11 plus 4 pullups.)

Double Unders are the New Suck

Today, after finally getting a set of squat cleans in that felt like some kind of fluid motion instead of a mechanical series of moves, we moved onto the WOD that I’m sure was designed just to make me angry:

15 minute [abbr title=”As Many Rounds As Possible”]AMRAP[/abbr].

This is the kind of workout that I’m sure I’m going to look at in a month or two and laugh at, because let’s face it, the first 3 pieces are pretty simple.  I actually treated the first two as rest phases today.

But that’s because I’m still learning double unders:

Yes I am a big whiner. But salty sweat + wound = ouch!

This is only the second WOD we’ve ever put them in (usually we just triple the number and do singles) and I’m steadily improving but at this point I’m at the “single, single, double, single, single, double” rhythm stage, and I can get 5 in a row on a good run.  The trouble is that that goes away as soon as I get tired, and the more tired I get, the more I miss.  Which makes me more tired.

In the second round my coach called an audible and dropped me to 12 double unders, and made it a 15 minute cap with a four round target, so somehow I managed to finish in 14 minutes.  The cleans and leg raises stayed easy, the wall ball got a little tougher, but we might as well have just made today be 60 double unders and be done with it.

Here’s the thing about jumping rope: it’s all about the wrist motion.  Everything else stays as still as possible.  Here’s the other thing about jumping rope: the second I try to think about any of that, it all falls apart.  Oh, and the bonus thing is that it gets my heart pumping like nothing else.  Plus the “rope = whip” thing.

And the top comment for that video says it all:

Best way to learn DUs: Buy that rope and fuck up a lot. It hurts like shit until you get it right.