Workout of the Day:
Front Lever
5 holds at your stage of the progression. Record total time
then:
For time:
Run 800 meters
40Kg Shoulder press, 21 reps
Run 800 meters
40Kg Push press, 21 reps [wmv][mov]
Run 800 meters
40Kg Push Jerk, 21 reps [wmv][mov]
Post times to comments.
Previous Front Lever Work
August 25th
August 6th
Kudos to Shane (Pixie) who designed and painted our new logo. Thanks dude!
Shoulder Press/Push Press/Push Jerk tri-panel…[wmv]
Shoulder Press-Push Press-Push Jerk…[ wmv]
Colm,
I did full pull ups yesterday not jumping.
Duly noted and edited, don’t know why I thought Jumping.
And I did 155 in the deadlift. Where my props at?
Due to shoulder issues I’m thinking of subbing the Speal workout of 4 rounds run 400m 50 squats. Of course I could change it to 800m to try and end around the same time as everyone else…
19.29.
Ah, it seems so quiet without Big Shane around. So how about another question?
Does anyone have a grasp of Art Devany’s Power Law? I’ve heard reference to it from several places but am unwilling to pay for a subscription to his site.
Kyle – A power law is just a particular type of mathematical distribution ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law).
If you were to graph something like “intensity of activity” against “frequency of occurrence” for a month or two for a wild animal, you’d find a big peak in the graph at a particular point (generally moderate-high intensity), with diminishing tails heading off into lower and higher regions.
Basically this says that animals do a lot of lying around, and when they get around to doing anything it generally happens in short, intense bursts. The diminishing tails at the edges of the graph indicate that sometimes, with much less frequency, they might spend all day wandering around slowly, and they sometimes engage in all-out sprints to save their lives and whatnot.
Art’s take is that wild humans followed a very similar distribution of activity, and he devised his whole Evolutionary Fitness regime based on this.
Compellingly, Coach cobbled Crossfit together on the basis of empiricism and what he observed to work best for his athletes, and arrived at a fitness regime that’s strikingly strikingly consistent with Art’s theories. Started at the other end, arrived in roughly the same place.
I dunno what’s happening with DeVanys blog lately, it used to be great, but he seems to have gone mad with power and fame at the moment.
Sweet, well I’ve got the ‘lot of lying around’ part down. On to the rest…
In my efforts to learn about the front lever progression I actually came across a few old posts from Coach Glassman on the CrossFit board, responding to someone having difficulty following front lever progressions.
Basically, he argued that another alternative to working through progressions and holding particular positions was to pull to being fully inverted and then slowly, slowly lower to standing (obviouslly ideally getting as close to a front lever as possible on the way). Said that if you were doing these negatives correctly then you should feel it in your lats and as a bonus improve pull-up numbers.
Might try it tonight, but my thoughts would be that most people have enough trouble with holding the 45 degree position (or even just inverted in some cases) to start with. I think doing the kind of negative he describes would actually take some doing.
I made a half-assed attempt at doing those for a while about a year ago, they kicked my ass and I never seemed to get any better at them
Must try them again now that I know how much patience these things require, good find Ruairi!
It’s mostly based on observations of modern day hunter-gatherer tribes Shane, and the assumption that they’re reasonably similar to the ancestral buckos.
Cordain ran the numbers on energy expenditure for a bunch of modern HG tribes in this paper – http://www.thepaleodiet.com/articles/Int%20J%20Sport%20Article.pdf , along with estimates of average energy requirements for various ancestral tribes based on things like their lean mass (estimated from muscle insertion points on fossil skeletons) and the amount of effort required to obtain enough calories to support it from the foods available at the time.
If you want to get into some hardcore reading on the subject, all of Cordain’s published research is collected here: http://www.thepaleodiet.com/published_research/
Well, there are already examples of people of advancing years who are successful coaches and athletes within CrossFit.
If these guys began CrossFitting comparatively late in life and are still doing it without sign of let-up, then I think it’s safe to say that those of us who have started a bit earlier should be able to plan ahead and ensure that we can do it too. Jim Baker for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57VqwpGqQhs (although I guess 60 is not that old these days)
Far as I can see CrossFit’s methodology is suitable for everyone, if they’re willing to scale the workouts to what they can manage safely.
Whether CrossFit is ‘natural’ is trickier question to answer definitively. Would whether something is more or less natural depend on how closely it equates to the physical challenges faced by our hunter/gatherer ancestors?
Er, and what Will said.
Big Shane’s back! And working out on his holiday? And philosophizing on all things CF? Amazing. So a few things:
An idea I’ve just started mulling around is the idea of not living Paleo but rather paleo plus. You obviously want to live in a climate controlled dwelling (even if you do block out all of the light), you want modern medicine, etc. These are all no-brainers.
So what about the ones that aren’t as obvious? Like Shane’s question on exercise. It may very well be what our bodies were evolved to do, but our bodies weren’t evolved to live 80 years, either. I’m not suggesting any of this is wrong of course, but the wheels have started turning. It’s not a new idea so I need to do some digging of thoughts on the subject.
Also good luck at the cert guys. Remember if Nicole challenges you to an overhead squat-a-thon, its a trap!
And finally, Amy–you hurt me tonight. There was rain. There was running. There was no Amy. I think I need some time before I feel that I can come back to CFI.
Yeah, Kyle came into the gym tonight and was all “W.M.B.A?”
Ah, yes I can’t believe I forgot to say well done to Rauiri on his first night coaching. None of the nervous bumbling nor awkwardness of last week.
Time to chime in on Natural. It was Glassman’s contention last year at the cert that the movements we do existed before the invention of ‘exercise’. We picked shit up, we sat down, we put stuff overhead, we ran, we rowed, we jumped up on things, we swang from trees.
Now, the whole high intensity thing, natural? I’m not so sure. There is a degree of contrivance in the workouts, so they’re not natural in that sense that nature won’t request you to do 21-15-9 of anything for food or survival. But I imagine we need this high intensity to illicit the neuro-endocrine response we want from exercise.
I posted a link on July 11th – http://crossfit.ie/2008/07/11/fri-jul-11th/ – on senior citizens do CF, so I can definitely see it’s application. Also, the longer someone can stand up of their own accord, push themselves out of a chair or pull themselves up the stairs, the better quality of life they’ll have, yes?
Or, we just like lifting heavy things because it’s cool.
Team R*Dawg
Deirdre: 55(90),17,22,12,10(45)
Kyle, The: 23,33,18,23,14(45)
Keith: Practiced Jump to Inverted Hang
Kyle, The – 17:55 (600m, 50 squats x4)
Deirdre – 18:27 (15Kg)
Mike – 18:35 (20Kg)
Keith – 21:15 (1 round running)
Nice work by Ruairi tonight, took to coaching with ease. And welcome back to Keith.
Team Colm & Dan
Split Jerks x 3
Paul: 40-50-60(f)-50-50
The Batman did deadlifting for sets of 5 with Dan. Not sure exactly but I think he did 5 x 80Kg for his last set.
Tabata Mash Up
Paul (Power Cleans/Box Jumps)
35/61
The Batman (Pull Ups/Sledgehammer Swings)
61/98
Kyle, there’s nothing I can do but apologise profusely. All my favourite things – running, rain, and The Kyle – I’m quite ashamed I missed it really. If I’d known it would have such a negative effect Kyle I’d have sacrificed my other plans. And now knowing that I won’t see you for at LEAST a week…how can I make it up to you????
Also, Ruairi, well done on session no 1 – sorry I missed it!
Still suffering after Tabata Something Else..
Finally got around to coming back to this discussion and giving it a read, some really interesting stuff, however unlike my namesake I don’t feel I know enough to contribute just yet, gonna have to start cracking the books me thinks! Good discussion though!
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