Thurs, Jul 24th
Workout of the Day:
Handstand Progression
Work up to 60 seconds on your level of progression. Record the number of sets it takes you to complete 60 seconds work. Scale duration to 30 seconds if you’re not advanced enough to hold for 30 seconds. A rule of thumb on any progression is that if you can’t hold the next stage for 10 seconds, you shouldn’t be moving up yet.
Then:
CF Games Heavy Deadlift Workout
5 rounds for time of:
125Kg Deadlifts, 5 reps
10 Burpees
Post time to comments.
The Freestanding Handstand Push-Up – Drillsandskills.com
The Handstand Press – Beastskills.com
Comments (13)
So to carry on from Kyle’s treatise on GPP yesterday (
) I guess my answer to his first post is a simple “yes”
Yes we want all those things: GPP, Health, Look good nekked, greater strength, etc.
Like I said briefly to Kyle yesterday, CF Manchester generally do ‘Weights before Cardio’, ie include a strength component in their workouts as well as the ‘traditional’ CF Metcon approach. What they’ve done is reduced the volume of each (less sets in the heavy stuff, shorter metcons) which reduces burnout.
Also, Karl’s observation is that most people’s weakness is their weakness, which echoes what Rip has said countless times, you damn fool.
My spin on the thing is that we also need the gymnastics movements, based off the observations that gymnasts excel at other sports quicker, and that this is a major weakness for CF Ireland folk. (We have the 11th standard of fitness down!)
I think the mainsite is always been tweaked and improved upon, if you look back a few years you see workouts a lot different then now. An example is the CFT, which didn’t exist until Dec 06 if I’ve got my dates right. Since Rip, we’ve had more dedicated strength days. Maybe the likes of skill/strength, then metcon is a way forward, particularly for affiliates who most of their clients aren’t 3 on, 1 off?
As for diet and burnout, I don’t think it’s so much burnout for most folks as it is plateauing.
Like Kyle said, most of us are Novices when it comes to fitness, so tweaking, adjusting, spending extra time on the problem areas isn’t necessary just yet, and particularly for those who train 2-3x/week.
As you develop in CF (or any other sport/health protocol) you’ll need to improve more areas. A major one is diet. If you find your fitness stalling, this is first place you should look, but usually the last place you will.
As young Walshe has said, with CF you get to decide how fit you become, not hope.
As an interesting anecdote, I’ve been Paleo Zone since Scotland, and reasonably Zone up until then. I’ve had about 4-5 hours sleep the last few nights but still feeling pretty energetic all round, and on only 2 green teas and 1 coffee a day.
Rant over for now.
Completely unrelated to the above, was perusing digg.com today and came across a random article from the Chicago Tribune (http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-080722-how-to-batman,0,3792080.photogallery), it’s basically a guide to How To Become Batman for just under $8 million, but in the fitness section who should get mentioned but the one and only Crossfit as the go-to guys for strength and conditioning. So there we go Crossfit is now endorsed by Batman, can’t get much better than that!
Shane-the video of that guy is a beast. OK, so not only is he starting almost a minute after Speal, he wasn’t even jerking the weight he was powering it up through a front squat and a push press, then didn’t even seem that winded at the end. Wow. It’s strange though, for the ultimate test of the best crossfitter to be over so few ‘modal domains’. It seems like all of the events were fast and/or heavy.
Also an interesting point on the gymnasts. Unfortunately there is no way to know. However, could we look to other sports? Through the weeding process of grade school to collegiate sports and maybe to the Olympics I would imagine most sports would have eliminated those without a the innate athleticism you mention. It reminds me of a quote from Glassman that said something like we can do other sports better than you, we can do your sport as good as you, and you can’t even do ours. Does crossfit naturally draw and retain alpha males that skew those results? Probably. But I would argue that when you get to the elite level of other sports you are dealing with alpha males as well. I may be out on a limb on this one, but I would guess that in a series of head to head hopper workouts of Greg Amundsun to Lance Armstron, Lance would only win one event.
Can’t do handstands, practised them for about 10 minutes then did the other in 8:19, with 80kg deadlifts.
Man I hate people that don’t know the difference between your and you’re.
So I really like the idea of adding gymnastics to the beginning of workouts and I’ve read a bit about muscle imbalances leading to injury so does it make sense to take two exercises—a pushing and pulling—and focus on them long enough to see progress, but short enough to work on other things? Maybe run them each twice a week on random days for a month or two?
Maybe something like handstand/L pullups; front lever/planche; muscle up/press to handstand; L-sit/one arm pullups or pistols? Thoughts? Colm—not trying to step on any toes if you already have a plan in mind but truth is I have been toying with the idea of doing something like this on my own for the last month or so I’ve been mulling over different methodologies…
When I was doing the leaving cert I took on Applied Maths as an extra subject, the big swot that I was. I remember my teacher saying that the number of A’s and B’s achieved in this subject were , on average, far higher than other subjects and that people automatically assumed that the tests were easier. If fact the tests had very little to do with it, the subject tended to attract those who had excelled in Maths and/or Physics and were, by extension, going to do well in applied maths too.
Point is, is Crossfit going to attract those who would do well in gymnastics, Olympic lifting anyway? I think Kyle is right in saying that the people drawn to Crossfit skew the results. However all that does it make people who are interested in all the disciplines that make up Crossfit better at Crossfit!
Quick question, what exactly are the different progressions for a handstand? I’m guessing its something like this:
Headstand against a wall
Freestanding Headstand
Handstand against a wall
Freestanding Handstand
Press to wall handstand
Press to freestanding handstand
Personally I can/could hold a handstand against a wall for over a minute easily and could hold a freestanding one (kicking off the wall) for about 5 or 6 seconds. Just curious as to what you meant Colm
I’ve got no doubt that there are people who are more or less genetically predisposed towards athletic success than others, but equally I think they make up only a proportion of people who go on to become athletic monsters in CrossFit.
In ‘Starting Strenght’ Rip talks a bit about genetic potential but if I recall correctly he argues that it is just one factor, and probably less important than diet (or as Rip puts it, how much the trainee eats).
My guess is that genetics is just one variable less important than others, for example whether or not the trainee has the mental fortitude required to turn up and train five days a week, and train hard, and train intelligently (i.e follow an intelligent programme like CrossFit).
I don’t know how you’d definitively prove any proposition about what makes CrossFit’s superstars so athletically successful either way, but for what it’s worth my impression from having trained martial arts longer than CrossFit as a sport is that of the people I’ve seen who became ridiculously good, only a few were ‘naturals’. Most of them were just hard workers who trained to the point where they could execute the basics very very well and had some degree of fitness. Thusfar in CrossFit based on the limited amount of people I’ve met I’d say the same thing. What the really fit ones all had in common was discipline and willpower in their training and diet. I didn’t meet any of them and think “hmmm this bastard was lucky with his genetics” or “hmmm must be the ‘roids”.
Personally I find this reassuring. There are no aspects of the way the top guys train that we cannot copy. It’s just the intensity we can’t match yet. I guess it goes back to that old line from Glassman about how the needs of elite athletes and ordinary people differ not in kind, only by degree.
Shane,
In re-reading my post I seem very dismissive of Lance Armstrong, which wasn’t my intent (seem to be doing that a lot today). So I should probably clarify a few points.
I think Armstrong is amazing and is deserving of the hero status applied to him and feel comfortable in saying that he is an elite level athlete that no crossfitter will likely achieve. Secondly, I think Glassman’s quote, while clever and quotable isn’t really true and is really elitist. I have no doubt that you could go into any Globo gym and find someone (or several someones) that could handily kick my ass at any WOD I throw at them.
The reason I mentioned Armstrong is because I had recently read an article on powerrunning.com explaining how chemotherapy actually helped him because he lost 15 lbs of upper body mass that he never gained back. At the time I thought, wow I would never want to be at a level of any sport where that would be true, and something I had heard where he had turned in a terrible time in a marathon or something (which of course was hearsay and is probably not true). There’s certainly no denying his mental toughness as well. Honestly I’d be really curious how many pushup or pullups he could bang out—that info’s got to be out there somewhere.
The problem with any sport is that to reach the elite level, you absolutely must specialize at the expense of all other areas. Amateur Olifters have been told they must stop crossfitting if they want to compete seriously.
What I do think, and what I should have said is that the average crossfitter will do better, on average, at a wide variety of physical endeavours that the average athlete. In a decathlon of the top 100 cyclists and the top 100 crossfitters, I think I’d put my money on the crossfitters.
15.20
Considering my 1 rep max is 140, happy enough although was hoping for closer to 10. Problems gripping the bar due to sweating and the bar itself (the ridged grippy things weren’t where i was holding really).
Okay, since you asked.
Joanne – 6:48 (20Kg)
Jeff – 8:57 (100Kg)
Keith 7:45 (20kg)
Kyle – 7:14 as rx’d
Lisa – 7:14 (20Kg)
Martin 6:00(25Kg)
Rob – 6:55 (3 rounds, 125Kg)
Robbie – 9:39 (60Kg)
[...] Previous Handstand work – June 24th [...]
[...] Compare to July 24th [...]