Open Gym

Every Saturday morning, my CrossFit box holds "open gym".  On these days, there is no structured class.  Instead, members show up at their leisure to either work on specific skills, do a WOD they missed earlier that week, or even just hang out.  I wasn't sure I'd like this, but I was pleasantly surprised.  There are 2-3 instructors there who are available to coach you if you ask for their help.  It's pretty neat to get fairly personalized attention for almost whatever workout you feel like doing.

I arrived at the gym thinking I'd just goof off.  I wanted to work on pull-ups and practice my handstands.  The instructor, however, determined that the reason that my pull-ups were bad were because I haven't built up my endurance.  "Are you going to to do a workout?  You should do a workout," she says.  Uh oh.

Just like that, she starts getting me set up for last Tuesday's WOD, which I had missed.

My WOD:

4 RFT:

2x100m Sandbag Sprint (35 lb sandbag, run backwards for 2nd leg)

10 Burpees over Bar

10 Power Cleans (75 lbs)

16:18

This workout might have been as bad as Fran, and that's saying something.  By the third round, I could barely breathe and I was practically walking the sprints.  For whatever reason, I'm still astounded by how hard burpees are after a while.  I still had labored breathing a good 30 minutes after I finished the workout.  Ridiculous.

Signs of Improvement

Skill workout today was 1RM floor press.  It's like a bench press, but you lay on the floor.  After that, we were to drop the weight 10% and do as many reps as we could.  I didn't quite do that, but whatever.

1RM @ 215 lbs
17 reps @ 165 lbs

This amuses me because I am not in the least bit surprised by this outcome.  Having not had access to heavy weights but ample access to light weights for 9 months, the results are perfectly consistent with how I have been training.

WOD:

15m AMRAP

2 muscle-ups
4 HSPU
8 KBS @ 62 lbs

My modded WOD:

15m AMRAP
2x - 3 pull-up + 3 ring dips
4 HSPU
8 KBS @ 53 lbs

Result: 7

I'm pretty happy with my performance today.  As usual, the pull-ups got tough for me, but doing only 3 at a time definitely made it doable.  The dips were very easy.  I was very proud of my hand-stand push-ups today, as I was able to perform them without adding any assistance.  They got pretty rough toward the end, but I refused to get help.  The kettle bell swings started out pretty easy, but it's shocking how hard it feels at the end. I wonder if I should have done it Rx'd, but it's probably more prudent to take it slow.

Team Effort

As usual, the class typically begins with "active stretch" to get the blood pumping and the muscles limber followed by a "skills workout" to build competency in a particular movement.  Today's skill workout was doing handstands.  It's weird to think about how I've never actually done a handstand in my life, even as a kid in gymnastics class or horsing around with friends.  I think I started to get the hang of it toward the end of the workout session, holding a handstand for a few seconds at a time.  I want to revisit that soon since...well, it's awesome to be able to do handstand!


WOD:

2-person team
3 RFT:

Overhead squat AMRAP (Rx 95 lbs, I did 65 lbs)
400m run

13:32, 132 reps (70 of which were mine).

Today, I didn't feel nearly as sucky today.  Obviously, doing OH squats 30 lbs below Rx was a tremendous crutch, but it was still a tough workout.  When doing a lot of OH squats, it becomes extremely important to maintain a shoulder shrug as instructed in the Essentials class.  As fatigue sets on, the bar can get pretty wobbly unless you keep your lats locked and stabilized.  Squatting of course challenges the glutes, back, and abs, but holding a weight above my head gave me a hell of a burn in my trapezius.

The running also went better.  I paced myself in the first two with the intention of having some gas in the tank for the final bout.  Fortunately, the strategy worked and I was able to push the last 200m to finish the workout.  My partner only got 12 reps while I was running, so I like to think that my pace cut her short from finishing a few more.

Today I wore bandages over each blister and wore lifting gloves over that.  That was definitely a good idea.  The skin is still healing but at least it's no longer cracking open and feeling raw anymore.

Essentially Sucky

Today's WOD:

Fran
For time:

21-15-9
Push press (75 lbs, Rx is 95)
Pull-ups

14:21

Today was awful.  I guess Fran is known for being pretty tough, but I feel pretty crappy about how badly I did.  I finished dead last among my classmates.  Again, the pull-ups destroyed me, much the same as last week.  I'll definitely be working on those this weekend.

Up until this morning, my left shoulder had been bothering me.  I'm not sure how to characterize it.  I hesitate to call it an injury, since I still maintained full range of motion and strength, but I could definitely feel a sharp, shooting twinge in my deltoid when I held my arm out at certain angles.  Fortunately, the strain subsided just barely in time for this morning's workout, but I do worry about these minor hurts I seem to get every time I go to this gym.

Speaking of small pains, I got my first pair of blisters, one for each hand.  The skin peeled clean off while doing the pull-ups. I hardly felt it at the time, but I made up for it when I doused my hands in hydrogen peroxide.  At the time of this post, it's been approximately 13 hours and the wounds are still a little raw.  Lesson learned, I suppose: buy tape and use it.  Until then, I'm going to retreat back to my dorky weightlifting gloves.

Essentials, Day 6

Today was the final day of Essentials class!

The instructor had us join the 6:00am class for stretching and warm-up, but we broke off for a few minutes to review the major movements.  After that, however, we rejoined the class to do their WOD!

Today's WOD:

4 RFT

30 squats
15 burpees
5 wall walk

My time was 15:07.  Wall walks are awful (press '2' to skip to relevant footage).  If they don't seem that bad to you, I encourage you to try them.  In fact, I didn't even perform them "Rx", which I believe requires the athlete to touch his chest to the wall at the top position.  I only went  until my hands were ~8" away from the wall.  As I expected before we began, I was one of the last to finish in the class.  I think I beat two others, but not by much.

So that's it!  I am a graduate of the Essentials program and I am invited to train in whatever classes fit into my schedule.  I am debating whether to continue with the 6:00am class.  The issue hasn't really been waking up early, but mostly the commitment to go to bed at a reasonable time.  Regardless of the schedule I choose, I will need to upgrade my discipline and be able to sustain it.

I look forward to starting the "real thing".

Essentials, Day 5

I've been excited to write this post because today's lessons covered what is ostensibly one of the most controversial and polarizing elements of CrossFit.

Today, we learned kipping pull-ups.  What the hell is "kipping"?  Actually, it's much easier to watch than to read about, so I encourage you to follow the link (press '4' to skip to the most relevant footage).

For those not able to open YouTube, "kipping" is a momentum-generating movement that assists the execution of the pull-up.  The athlete swings such that her upper body and lower body act as counterweights to each other, which sort of generates centrifugal momentum about the bar that helps her clear her chin over the bar.  This makes the pull-up easier for two reasons:

1. The body's swinging generates a little bit of upward momentum, reducing the load on the back muscles.
2. As the upper body swings upward, the arms become relatively more horizontal.  This position puts the back's muscles at much higher mechanical advantage than it would be otherwise when hanging beneath the bar.

CrossFit endorses this style of pull-up because its goal is to maximize power.  That is to say, applying maximum force over a given distance in the least amount of time possible.  Kipping allows a person to do more work (moving your head from beneath the bar to above the bar) in less time.  Indeed, kipping certainly helps achieve that goal compared against it's older brother, the dead-hang pull-up.

At this point, traditionalists and critics write off CrossFit immediately here.  A pull-up, evidently, is a pretty sacred movement in the world of fitness and many feel that CrossFit shits all over it.  And to be perfectly honest, the traditionalists have a point:

1. The purpose of the traditional pull-up has always been to build upper-body strength.  The movement primarily works the latissimus dorsi, along with 12 other muscles acting as synergists.  It's been a staple of upper-body strength training for a very, very long time.
2. If  you were hanging such that your body were against a flat surface, such as a rock or a building, kipping would serve no purpose.  The only way to pull yourself up would be to have sufficient upper body strength.

So who's right?  Well, neither.  And both.

Kipping pull-ups meet their training objectives in that they do hoist your body up very quickly and efficiently.  It's an exercise to develop power and endurance.  That said, I do not believe that this is an optimal technique to develop raw back strength.

Traditional pull-ups meet their training objectives in that they develop the back muscles.  It's an exercise to build raw strength.  That said, I do not believe that this is an effective technique for delivering power.

So all told, the two exercises are separate techniques that serve different purposes.  Much the way that a deadlift and a clean hit many of the same muscle groups but train them in very different ways, so are kipping pull-ups and dead-hang pull-ups.  I'm not sure why this causes such a commotion among fitness communities, as both exercises have their proper place.

At any rate, here was my WOD today:

3 RFT

5 pull-ups
10 HR push-ups (lift hands from the floor at bottom of the push-up)
15 box jumps
20 push presses (55 lbs)
15 kettle bell swings
10 GHD (glute-ham-developer) sit-ups
5 ring dips

15:43

The push presses were easily the most taxing part of the workout.  In the third heat, I needed 5 or 6 rests.  This workout certainly panders to my strengths more than the ones involving endurance, so I'm happy to have finally beaten my classmate on something.  Not by much, but I'll take it.

Benchmarks

My previous posts have been rather enthusiastic about the supposed benefits of CrossFit.  The principles on which CrossFit is designed seem sound to me within the frameworks of strength training and general conditioning.  CrossFit boasts that its training alone can prepare an athlete for a pretty broad range of sports and competitions.  I've been told rather tall tales of CrossFitters who have run marathons and done triathlons doing nothing but CrossFit to train.  I find these boastful claims to be suspect and sometimes unrealistic, but who am I to judge until I've tried the training regimen for a substantial amount of time?

While I've committed myself completely to CrossFit for the foreseeable future, I want to do so with enough objectivity that I can judge its effectiveness against my past training and personal feats.  Below, I chronicle a few of my personal records for a variety of different exercises and events.  My memory serves me rather poorly, so these PRs are not exact, but it should be a close enough approximation to use as a benchmark.  I am certain, however, that these estimates are conservatively biased.

• 5K run: 20:00
• 10K run: 42:00
• Deadlift: 285 lbs
• Back squat: 225 lbs
• Bench press: 225 lbs
• Dead-hang pull-ups: 15+

CrossFit seems to suggest that if I train under its regimen to a fairly high level of fitness, I should be able to perform the above activities as well or almost as well as I did when I trained for them specifically.  There isn't much supporting evidence to suggest how close I can come, so I'm arbitrarily deciding that I should be able to achieve at least 90% of my PR for all of these movements.  That translates to:

• 5K run: 22:13
• 10K run: 46:40
• Deadlift: 257 lbs
• Back squat: 203 lbs
• Bench press: 203 lbs
• Dead-hang pull-ups: 14 pull-ups

These targets aren't intimidating when viewed on their own, but to have the capacity to do any one of them at almost any time is downright unbelievable.

I promise to put forth the effort and intensity that gives myself the best chance of hitting these benchmarks.  If I am successful, I will have no problem getting behind CrossFit as a legit strength and conditioning framework.

Off-day topics: Hydration

In the spirit of keeping the content coming, I figured I'd choose topics to discuss on my off-days.  Actually, I may still go to the gym today, but it's good to talk about fitness topics regardless.

A reader asked me to discuss the importance of hydration during workouts, especially CrossFit workouts.

I've long been of the unsubstantiated opinion that the human body can tolerate a fairly wide range of hydration levels.  Kidneys are a pretty neat little organ and from a physiological standpoint and they do a pretty fantastic job of maintaining homeostasis, so long as you don't overdo it in one direction or the other.  However, from a sports standpoint, what exactly should we be doing?

1. How do we lose and gain water?

Water is lost via perspiratory, respiratory, renal, and gastrointestinal processes.  In English, you lose water by sweating, breathing, peeing, and pooping.

Water is gained from consumption and metabolic processes.  In English, your body gains water by drinking and by simply being alive.

Typically, the net water turnover from respiratory and metabolic processes is fairly close to zero, whether at rest or not.

Peeing is obviously a loss of water, but water excreted by the kidneys has arguably already exited your body, so it doesn't "count" per se.  Furthermore, renal activity greatly reduces during exercise, as the body naturally mobilizes itself for a protracted period of sweating and elevated metabolic needs.

Normal poop contains very little water, so water loss from bowel movements is minimal (exception: diarrhea).  Intestines do a pretty fantastic job of eking out every bit useful nutrient, including water, from the food you ingest.

Therefore, the primary source of water loss is sweating.

2. How much sweating is too much sweating before athletic performance degrades?

The ACSM asserts that >2% bodyweight loss of water is a "critical water deficit" that degrades aerobic exercise potential, citing higher core body temperature and higher heart rate as the main reasons for degradation.  The same article also suggests that the marginal decrement in aerobic performance is minimal as loss of water continues; it's mostly an all-or-nothing bodily response.  Note that >3% is considered clinically dehydrated.  Lastly, the article suggests that neither muscle strength nor anaerobic capacity are significantly impacted by hydration levels.

I haven't weighed myself in quite some time, but assuming I am still roughly 157 lbs, a 2% loss of water is approximately a 48 oz water deficit, or 3 full pints of water.  That's an enormous amount of water to lose to sweating and I would suspect that an hour of exercise at varied intensity is not sufficient to cause such a deficit, but I don't want to assume too much.  Which leads to my next question...

3. How quickly does a person lose water to sweating during exercise?

Obviously, sweat rates can vary greatly according to activity, individual physiology and a huge number of environmental factors.  The article's observations show sweat rates for a variety of sports (rowing, soccer, football, tennis, triathlon, etc.) and range from 0.5 to 2.0 L/h, or 17 to 67 oz per hour.

So there you have it.  Depending on circumstances, it's quite possible to lose enough water during a one-hour workout to yield sub-optimal aerobic performance.  Combined with the relatively common incidence of beginning a workout while partially dehydrated, it is quite possible that insufficient hydration could be a factor.

4. Okay, so what should we do?

To keep it simple, here is what is generally recommended:

• Hydrate immediately before your workout.  12-16 oz will usually suffice.
• Every 15-30 minutes during your workout, take a drink.  It could be anywhere from 5-20oz, depending.
• After your workout, be sure to drink consistently for the next 4-6 hours.

It is very uncommon to find an athlete that maintains pre-workout water levels throughout his or her training.  Drinking fluid after a workout to replace lost fluids is critical.  Recall that sweating continues well after a workout, but also that peeing resumes.  While a normal person is unlikely to know their total water loss for a given workout, it doesn't hurt to keep sipping water for a few hours post-workout.

I know that I need to up my water intake, both inside and outside the gym.  I won't be able to measure improvements because of this change, but relative to the effort I need to put forth elsewhere, this is by far the easiest way to get a small gain in athletic performance.

Essentials, Day 4

We learned a few new movements today, primarily of the gymnastic/calisthenic variety:

• Box jumps
• Burpees
• Knee-ups, Knees-to-elbows, Feet-to-bars
• Hand-stand push-ups.

A burpee is simply the act of dropping to the floor, prone and chest touching the floor, then getting up as quickly as possible, finishing with a short jump and a clap of the hands overhead.

Knee-ups and their cousins are performed while hanging from a pull-up bar.  They're mostly self-explanatory.  Sometimes Knees-to-elbows and Feet-to-bars are abbreviated K2E and F2B, respectively.

An "Rx" Hand-stand push-up, often abbreviated HSPU, is performed by doing a hand-stand against the wall, lowering your head to the floor, then pushing back up.  The exercise can be heavily modified to reduce load and improve mechanical advantage for the athlete-in-training.  We used a 24" box to place our feet on, which alleviates the bodyweight a great deal.

Anyway, here was the workout for today:

FT (for time)

• 400m run
• 20 box jumps (24")
• 10 burpees
• 500m row
• 20 pull-ups
• 10 K2E
• 500m row
• 20 Wall Ball (16 lb med ball)
• 10 HSPU (modded with box)
• 400m run

I completed it in 18:32.  This workout kicked my ass.  And my breaking point was where I would actually have least expected it: the pull-ups.  I could not do 20 pull-ups to save my life, which is curious to me since I (previously) felt that, on the whole, my upper body strength was far less deteriorated than my core and leg strength.

I powered through the run, box jumps, burpees and rowing with relative ease and gained a pretty significant lead on my classmate.  But the pull-ups ended me.  It took me a very long time to complete them.  The Wall Balls were difficult for me too as I was unable to link too many of them together, but my slowness there doesn't even compare to how hard a time I had with pull-ups.

I knew that a weightlifting background would be only marginally useful for CrossFit, but today's workout really highlighted this for me.  I underestimated just how out-of-shape I am.

I can't wait to look back on this post and laugh about how crappy I was.

Essentials, Day 3

Last day of Essentials for the week!

Today we learned shoulder movements: shoulder press, push press, wall ball, and the push jerk.

Shoulder Press

1. Stand up tall, core tight, bar beneath your chin, supported by clavicle and hands.  Have elbows slightly pointed forward.
2. Pull head straight back, keeping eyes level, while the bar travels straight upward.
3. As the bar passes above the head, return head to neutral position and lock the elbows.
4. Leading with the elbows, lower the weight while moving your head backward again to make way for the bar.  Return to starting position.

Push Press

This is very similar to the shoulder press, but is a power-generating movement that allows you move more weight and move it faster than a standard shoulder press

1. Drop hips straight down, as though somebody pressed the back of your knees to cause them to break.
2. Straighten legs and drive hips upward while executing shoulder press.
3. The finishing position should be the same as in the shoulder press.

Wall Ball

Wall ball is pretty fun!  We didn't do too many of them, but I can tell it would make for a pretty tough workout.

1. Stand in front of the wall.
2. Starting in a squat position, hold a medicine ball in front of your face (almost close enough to kiss it).
3. Drive upward while performing push press movement.
4. Release the ball at full extension.  Ball should get enough height to touch the line painted on the wall.  (I do not know how high up it is; I'll be sure to ask next time)
5. Catch the ball and absorb its impact by lower back into squat position.  Repeat.

Push Jerk

This is sort of a variation on classic olympic lift.  Of the presses discussed today, this one enables the lifter to the most amount of weight.  This link sorta distinguishes the shoulder press, push press, and push jerk.  One small difference is that we split our feet, like this woman.  (N.B. her execution of the clean and jerk is far from perfect, so I don't recommend the video as a reference guide).

1. Perform a push press.
2. As the bar travels up, split the feet apart to get beneath the bar.
3. Retract the feet to neutral starting position, starting with forward foot then the back foot.

I found that I slightly prefer my left foot to go forward, but it didn't matter much.  With respect to foot position, the toes should be pointed slightly inward for stability's sake.  Also, the rear foot's heel should not be bearing weight; focus the weight on the ball of that foot.

That said, my WOD was the following:

3 RFT:

10 push presses

20 sit-ups using the Abmat

400m dash

I finished in 11:37 I believe, push-pressing 45 lbs.  My classmate beat me by a pretty good margin, having powered through the final bout's sit-ups and proving to be a far better runner than me.  The dude is a 32 year old father (plus or minus), so I'm a little peeved about losing to him.  But hey, it's only the beginning.

Essentials, Day 2

2:00am - Wake up suddenly, worried that I have overslept.

4:40am - Wake up again, realize I still have a half hour til alarm goes off. Fuck.

5:10am - Alarm goes off.

5:20am - Take dogs for a brisk 1mi loop.

5:40am - Feed dogs, pound a protein shake.

5:50am - Off to the gym!

6:00am start sounds pretty awful, but truth be told I felt better today than I did on Monday. I'm not sure if I'm getting used to it, excited about the class, better rested, or some combination of the three, but I feel pretty good.

The morning started off with the same warm-up exercises. I forgot about one of them in my prior post. It was simply kicking your heel into your butt and grabbing the foot to stretch the quads while extending your opposite hand toward the sky. By the way, the inch-worm warm-up still kicks my ass.

Today was about learning the deadlift, the sumo deadlift, and the clean. As per the first class, we started with PVC tubes, then graduated to training bars, then to adding plates. One neat thing I had not previously noticed is that the plates are foam-covered, thus making it safer and quieter when the bar is dropped to the floor after a clean.

In this class, I was taught to perform a deadlift as follows:

The standard deadlift

1. Place feet beneath your hips, as though you had just let your legs fall into a neutral position. Face toes forward.
2. Your grip's width is determined by where your hands lay on the bar when you hold your extended thumbs against the outside of your shins.
3. Raise your tailbone as high as you can and keep your shoulder blades "down". Keep chest high.
4. Lift the bar, keeping the bar as close to the legs at all times.
5. As the bar is approaching the knee, straighten the legs and continue lifting the bar along the leg. Keep a tight core and keep tailbone pointed "up" as much as possible.
6. Finish the lift by driving heels into the floor and driving hips forward. Shoulder blades should still be "down".

This is more or less how I learned to deadlift back in college. However, the straightening of the leg as the bar passes the knees was a new sensation for me as it really highlighted my poor flexibility. At no point did I feel the lift itself was physically taxing, but maintaining strict form really stretched my hamstrings to the point that the tension was a little uncomfortable. I am told that my flexibility will improve naturally over time.

Next was the sumo deadlift. This lift is done with a wider stance than a standard deadlift, with toes pointed outward a bit. Like a sumo wrestler's stance, duh.

Sumo deadlift

1. Assume sumo stance, minding the same posture requirements as the standard deadlift. Kettle bell should be in the middle of the stance.
2. Grip kettle bell and begin deadlift.
3. Explode upward, driving heels down and hips forward.
4. Leading with the elbows, row the kettle bell up to your chest.
5. Lower the weight to its original position.

After that we moved on to our first olympic lift, the clean. This is a pretty old school movement, designed to be a multi-jointed, full-body exercise that trains nearly every muscle in the body to provide explosive power. The clean, deadlift, squat and jerk are lauded as core weightlifting movements since they recruit so many muscles in such a way that universally prepares the weightlifter for almost all of life's physical challenges and athletic requirements. To my knowledge, every legit athlete incorporates these movements into their workouts. And I don't doubt it. Whether you're breaking tackles, driving the lane, catching a wave, or running from a lion, there is no situation in which you don't need to be able to generate high amounts of force per unit time.

This was easily the best lesson I ever got learning the clean. Rather than using a bar, we were given medicine balls (the large, cushy kind). We got into the starting squat position, placing palms on either side of the ball.

1. Begin the upward lift of the ball.
2. As the ball approaches the waist, explode upward while shrugging the shoulders.  Do not use the elbows or any other "throwing" motion to help the ball up.  It should travel upward strictly due to the upward momentum of the squat and shrugging movement.
3. Rotate hands around the ball while lower yourself into a squat position so as to catch the ball before gravity takes over the ball's trajectory.
4. Stand straight up, hips forward.  Drop the ball when finished.

To practice this, the instructor broke up the movement by catching the ball for us at its apex and giving us however much time we wanted to get used to getting beneath it.  It was extremely helpful in learning the motion and getting comfortable.

The workout for the day was the following:

3 RFT (reps for time)

12 deadlifts

9 cleans

200m run

I deadlifted only 65 lbs and cleaned only a 10 lb med-ball.  Neither my classmate nor I really pressed hard and we finished simultaneously, in 9:37 I believe.  Despite the low weight, it was more sufficient to work up a sweat.

Tomorrow is Day 3 of the Essentials Program.  I will report back soon!

10 Pillars of Fitness

The CrossFit Journal is an interesting publication. As far as I can tell, it's a monthly compendium of articles submitted by self-proclaimed experts and athletes in the world of fitness who expound on the benefits of CrossFit via empirical and/or experimental evidence-based writing. Though the submissions are claimed to go through "rigorous review", I see no evidence that this journal is peer-reviewed by a committee of recognized fitness coaches and experts.

It's not to say I have a problem with that, but I figured I'd first admit to the source's wonkiness before gushing about it.

This article grabs my attention because it describes a lot of the muddied thoughts I've been having about fitness. I've had them parked in the back of my head for years, but never bothered to actually do anything about it. I guess it's true that hard work is never popular.

Anyway, the article is definitely of the tl;dr variety, so I'll try to summarize below:

"Fitness" has been insufficiently defined in the past, so CrossFit has taken it upon themselves to define it. The definition of fitness disaggregates into 3 standards:

FIRST, there are 10 skills by which physical aptitude can be measured. You are only as fit as you are competent in each one. They are:

- cardiovascular/respiratory endurance

- stamina

- strength

- flexibility

- power

- speed

- coordination

- agility

- balance

- accuracy

SECOND, true fitness requires the ability to perform any physical task well, including and especially unfamiliar and unforeseen challenges. Dispense with what you think you know about sets, routines, periodization, and the like.

THIRD, true fitness requires balanced development and competency in the three major metabolic pathways: phosphogen, glycolytic, and oxidative. That's a little bit gobbledygooky, but basically this standard states that you should optimize all three ways in which your body mobilizes energy to exert itself. That might be a short, explosive exertion such as a high vertical jump (phosphogen), a moderately powered activity such as an intense tennis rally (glycolytic), or an endurance activity such as running a 10K (oxidative).

So basically, CrossFit aims to prepare you for anything and everything and suggests that if you are simultaneously competent in 800-meter track events, gymnastics, and olympic weightlifting, you would be phenomenally more fit than the vast majority of amateur athletes.

Dave, one my CrossFit coaches, shared the following saying with me. It's intended to be a hypothetical retort of a CrossFit athlete to a specialized athlete of any variety:

"I can do what you do almost as well. You can't do what I do at all. And what we both can't do, I can do it better than you."

Cheers to that! Let's see what happens.

Vernacular

CrossFit reminds me of soccer in America. A LOT of people play it and love it, but in day-to-day life you just don't hear about it much and only those involved in the underground culture really "get it".

And, like anything that has a large following yet isn't mainstream, there is a lot of confusing lingo and shorthand that just doesn't make sense until someone explains it to you. To me, understanding the vernacular won't make you an automatic inductee into a cult, but it certainly helps understand what is going on.

The CrossFit facility itself is often called a "box". Not sure why this terminology is necessary, but I believe the point is to differentiate boxes, which range from hangars to warehouses to garages to basements, from gyms, which are the more familiar Powerhouses, Gold's, and 24 Hour Fitness facilities.

It bears mentioning the similarities and differences between boxes and gyms. Both have a great deal of overlapping equipment and fixtures: barbells, plates, squat cages, pull-up bars, rowing machines, etc. Boxes also have things I don't typically see in traditional gyms: gymnastics rings, kettle bells, medicine balls, tires, stackable boxes, etc. Finally, boxes have a distinct lack of things I usually see in traditional gyms: weight machines of any variety, dumbbells, stationary bikes, ellipticals, treadmills, etc.

CrossFit is unique from most training programs in that most folks who engage in high intensity training programs do it as preparation for a particular sport. A competitive downhill skier might train in the gym with a variety of olympic lifts and jumps. A professional wide receiver might jump rope and do agility ladder exercises. In other words, the training is a means to an end. With CrossFit, the training is the means AND the end. CrossFit itself is the sport for which you perpetually prepare. By extension, it therefore prepares you for any kind of physically demanding, athletic activity.

In CrossFit, there are dozens of "benchmark" workouts, which are commonly given girls' names (Angie, Fran, Grace, Cindy, etc.). They are not a strictly required set of exercises for anybody who practices CrossFit, rather they are used to compare yourself to other CrossFit atheletes. To my knowledge, all of them are timed in some fashion, whether you "do as many of these as you can in x minutes" or "do these x times in as little time as you can". This brings competitive spirit to CrossFit and gives athletes a goal (beat the other guy). Note that there is little glory in becoming king of only one or two benchmark workouts. The spirit of CrossFit is that you achieve such a high degree of fitness that you excel at ANY benchmark workout on any given day.

CrossFit organizers usually come up with a "Workout of the Day", almost universally abbreviated WOD and pronounced as such. The main website always posts one, which many boxes use, but any certified coach can generate their own. Workouts seem to be always cross-functional and full-body. Though the WOD may have a particular emphasis -- agility, power, strength, or cardiovascular endurance -- they are designed to hit everything at least a little bit. This is distinguished from bodybuilding, which emphasizes different muscle groups throughout the week but almost never any other aspect of fitness.

To be sure, there is quite a bit more vernacular, particularly of the shorthand used to describe a person's workout, but I figured I'd start somewhere. I'm not aiming to provide a glossary of terms, but rather introduce lingo to the blog as it becomes relevant to me and to the blog. I imagine that as I get more involved in the program, I'll use more and more of the shorthand and (hopefully) less and less of the current format's wall o' text.

Fundamentals, fundamentals

“Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals. You’ve got to get the fundamentals down because otherwise the fancy stuff isn’t going to work.”

- Randy Pausch

I've enrolled myself into the Essentials Program at my CrossFit gym. It's a 6-session program over 2 weeks that familiarizes people with all of the major movements in CrossFit exercises. Today was the first day.

I started at 6:00am sharp, which meant a 5:10am alarm clock to give me enough time to walk the dogs a mile before leaving for the gym. I only had one other classmate, however the regular class was surprisingly full, with about 12-15 people attending.

Started with warm-up exercises, mostly dynamic stretching:

1. Deep lunges with both hands down on the floor positioned ipsilaterally of your calf, transition to calf stretch with hands on either side of your forward knee, then stand up and pull opposite knee into body. Alternate sides as you move forward across the room.

2. Grab your ankle and pull it up toward your abdomen while leaning back a bit to stretch posterior hip flexors and glutes. Alternate sides as you walk across the room.

3. Start in a plank position and take baby steps forward while leaving hands in their initial position. Body transitions from plank to acutely angled downward facing dog. Then walk hands forward until you return to plank position. This was pretty tough on the shoulders (anterior deltoid).

4. While holding your hand out horizontally in front of you, palm down, kick your opposite, straightened leg up til you connect your toe with your palm. Alternate sides as you walk down the room.

After the warm-up, which admittedly (shamefully?) made me break a sweat, we grabbed a medicine ball (the big cushy kind, not the rubber roly poly kind) and a tube of PVC piping. Mara, our trainer for the day, proceeded to teach us the basics of classic squatting. She explained the squat is probably the most fundamental and important core functional movement for almost any physical activity and certainly for any CrossFit activity. That said, she was a pretty big stickler about our form and execution.

Not to say that I haven't done ANY squats since college, because I have, but I have certainly not done any heavy squatting (150+ lbs) since then. I tweaked my back in college and chalked it up to an injury, but according to the trainer, my form tends to break down at the bottom of the squat. I begin to tuck my tail under my body when I should be striving to move the hip further out and maintain a curve in the small of my back. If that's the case, that would certainly explain a lot pain in lower back while under load.

We practiced 3 types of squats: back squat, front squat, and overhead squat. I haven't done front squats since college and have never attempted overhead squats before. With, at most, a 15 lb training bar as my load, none of the movements felt particularly challenging.

The overhead squat was interesting. Amounting to what is basically the latter half of a full snatch, Mara encouraged us to focus on, in addition to proper squat form, keeping our shoulders shrugged and applying rotational pressure at the pinky end of our grip. These minor adjustments supposedly help lock the shoulder and back joints in order to provide maximum support for the weight suspended 8-10 inches above our heads.

We only did 5 of them with the 15 lb training bar, but even that short bout indicated that overhead squats could get very difficult very quickly as you load the bar.

Next, the actual work out. Mara had us do "Cindy". Strictly, Cindy is a 20-minute workout in which you rotate through the following routine: 5 pull-ups, 10 push-ups, 15 squats. The aim is do as many rounds as possible in a 20-minute period. Mara only had us do 10 minutes and emphasized form over speed for this workout, so I didn't want to push too hard. I only got 4 rounds in 10 minutes. As a benchmark, elite CrossFit athletes can usually do 15-25 rounds in 20 minutes.

In my next post, I'll discuss lingo and philosophy.

Day One

Well, here goes my attempt at blogging. Blogger tells me that my last post was exactly five years ago to the day. This time, however, I'll have content to publish on a regular basis!

First, a smidgen of context. This blog's most probable audience has known me plenty long enough to know that I have long been a huge fitness dork (among other types of dorks as well, but those types are less relevant here). Since college, my bread and butter has been traditional weightlifting and bodybuilding. Not to say that I've limited my horizons to repeatedly picking up and putting down heavy objects. Not in the least. I've done mid-distance running (5K-10K), rowing, swimming, "boot camp", kickboxing, yoga, pilates...nearly everything that can be done in a gym, I've probably done it. Except Zumba.

And yet, for years I've been longing for something new. I've grown tired of spending hours in the gym only to yield menial improvements in raw strength while witnessing continued deterioration of other important areas of fitness such as cardiovascular endurance, flexibility, and agility. As I approach the ripe age of 30, brute strength and "club muscles" aren't terribly meaningful or useful (arguably, they never were).

In other words, I've been seeking a comprehensive fitness regimen that builds "athleticism". I live a life where I don't strive for excellence in any one physical activity or sport -- I don't run competitively, ski, snowboard, play soccer, stand-up paddleboard, golf, or save people from burning buildings with sufficient frequency that I ought to train specifically for any one of them. However, I would like to be as prepared as possible to do any one of them on any given day.

Enter CrossFit. As I understand it, CrossFit is a cult exercise phenomena that has made a "sport" out of a wide variety of cross-training activities borrowed from dozens of training regimens utilized by nearly every known sport. Commonly used movements include those that specifically target functional strength and power: olympic lifts, jumps, squats, etc. Said another way, CrossFit aims to train you and prepare you to be able to move large loads (yourself or otherwise) over long distances in short periods of time in whatever direction (e.g. up, forward).

The primary purpose of this blog is simply to record my progress and serve as an exercise journal. I never bothered keeping one before, which has probably been to my detriment, so I'm glad to address this deficiency now. The secondary aim of this blog is to record my thoughts on this new training program from the point of view of an 10-year veteran gym rat and biomedical engineering major with enough background knowledge in kinesiology, physics, and biomechanics to get himself in serious trouble. I hope this blog is informational, interesting, and perhaps even motivational.

Special thanks to Steven Gee, who has contributed more to the fitness side of my life than anyone else.