Finishing First*

I finished first in the WOD today!!  I did 50 lbs less than Rx, but I'll take what I can get.

WOD:

5 RFT

6 Squat Cleans (85 lbs)
12 Burpees

10:15

Yup, burpees are hard.  Anyway, I chose to go with only 85 lbs today since I am new to squat cleans.  A squat clean is basically a standard clean that goes into a full front squat.  The idea is that I should be able to move a relatively heavier weight because I can squat down to "catch" the bar, requiring less power generation from the upper body to move the bar.

I haven't been lending much commentary lately on CrossFit, so I figured I'd weigh in a little bit today.  Today's workout was a strenuous, full-body workout with a blend of cardiovascular conditioning and compound weightlifting movements.  All in all, that is precisely what I was looking for in a new workout routine.  However, I question the programming of the powerlifting movements.  Today's WOD involved 30 cleans and last week I did 40 snatches (per arm!).

Traditionally, Olympic style lifts are performed at relatively heavy weight for very few reps.  Their original purpose was not to help train a high degree of muscular stamina and cardiovascular endurance, but rather to train the neuromuscular system to generate maximum strength and speed.  Since the compound movement is just as much about engaging the nervous response as it is about conditioning the muscles, there are rapidly diminishing returns on repeating the movement over and over.  For instance, in training for a 100m dash, no amount of jogging will prepare you to jump off the blocks faster when the gun fires.  Conversely, there's only so much jumping off the blocks you can do again and again before you are no longer getting positive results.  This leads to my other point: the reduced weight of a high-repetition set fails to prepare the nervous system for moving very heavy weight, thus counteracting the original design of these lifts.

As a full-body exercise that gets my heart rate to 90% of max while hitting nearly every major muscle group, high-repetition O-lifts are working flawlessly.  But as an effective way to build my body's capacity to deliver power through neuromuscular conditioning, color me suspicious.  CrossFit makes some big claims about training "across broad time and modal domains", and arguably these WODs are accomplishing that, but I'm just not sure that the powerlifting elements are necessarily the safest and most effective way to do it.