011209 – 3x Tabata Sequence
I’m still not sure whether it’s a great idea to hammer two days in a row on the same muscle groups. In fact, from everything I know it seems like a decidedly bad idea. But it’s also not impossible that my knowledge of exercise physiology–which could fit in a thimble–is a bit behind the times.
That being said, I knew I was in for an uncomfortable workout when I saw on the whiteboard that today’s WOD was a Tabata sequence of air squats, push-ups and sit-ups. We did thrusters & ring push-ups the day before and my legs were sore enough that I came into the box early to foam roll my quads and IT band.
Today’s WOD:
Tabata sequence (20s on/10s off – x8) of:
Air squats: 148
Push-ups: 78
Sit-ups: 72
Total: 298
The dude next to me racked up 180 air squats. That was slightly demoralizing. Otherwise, a pretty decent performance considering my quads and chest were pretty worked over from the day before.
Solving knee problems w/ Kelly Starrett
Unfortunately this is locked behind CrossFit’s premium wall, but if you’ve paid the handful of quarters required for a CrossFit Journal membership, this is a fantastic video on knee pain issues by Kelly Starrett.
Shorter version for the miserly: properly executed squats solve many knee problems.
Here’s a link to all three segments.
And the individual links:
Kelly Starrett’s Solving Knee Problems #1 ($)
On the lameness of the NY Times’ coverage of CrossFit – Part II
Ok, Part II, let’s see here. When we last left the article (Part I) Greg Glassman was about to tell us about how CrossFit can kill you and Stephanie Cooperman was going to chime in that CrossFitters eagerly look death in the eye and flip it the bird because they want to be fit at any cost. To wit:
”It can kill you,” he said. ”I’ve always been completely honest about that.”
But CrossFitters revel in the challenge. A common axiom among practitioners is ”I met Pukey,” meaning they worked out so hard they vomited. Some even own T-shirts emblazoned with a clown, Pukey. CrossFit’s other mascot is Uncle Rhabdo, another clown, whose kidneys have spilled onto the floor presumably due to rhabdomyolysis.
Even though I do have my officially sanctioned CrossFit.com Message Board username, I haven’t really gotten deeply involved over there. One of the reasons is that even a casual perusal of the message boards leads you to a fair amount of this sort of macho posturing. And the unfortunate thing about the drafting/editing job here is that the sentence about “reveling in the challenge” which starts with “[B]ut” does a really good job of acting like people who do CrossFit revel in the challenge provided by CrossFit because it can kill you. Well, I haven’t done a comprehensive survey, but I have friends that do CrossFit (your humble blogger also does it), and I can tell you that their attitude about it bears very little resemblance to BASE jumping or other adrenaline junkie activities pursued largely or entirely b/c of the danger involved. People do CrossFit b/c, inter alia, they want to look good naked, beat up on the guys in their Pub Soccer League, or just generally be able to carry out daily activities and not feel old and sore afterwards. There’s a non-zero risk of death in doing any kind of intense exercise, but if the risk of death while doing CrossFit was even approaching substantial I can guarantee you it would be a lot less popular. I can also guarantee you that the 65-year old mother of 3, grandmother of 8 that works out at your local box is not doing it b/c of the thrill of asymptotically approaching certain death. Granted, your average CrossFit patron isn’t elderly, but the demographics of my local box are skewed way older than I would have guessed.
Speaking of the elderly, some people are worried about grannies being forced at gun point to do handstand push-ups:
When he started CrossFit, Mr. Kassum was unable to do a handstand, but after a year with the program he can do push-ups from that position. CrossFit exercises can be made more or less intense based on a person’s abilities, but the workouts are the same for everyone, from marines to senior citizens. And some critics say that is a big part of what’s wrong.
”My concern is that one cookie-cutter program doesn’t apply to everyone,” said Fabio Comana, an exercise physiologist at the American Council on Exercise. He said people in their 60’s who have osteoporosis, for example, may not be able to do an overhead press, pushing a barbell over one’s head.
You know what Mr. Fabio Comana exercise physiologist?! This is where it might have been helpful to have the reporter’s questions asked of you via email so you had time to think about the answer. Had you thought for more than 5 seconds before blurting out the first thing that popped into your head you might have come to the brilliant solution that CrossFit gyms across the country seem to have stumbled upon in unison: SUBSTITUTING A DIFFERENT EXERCISE! Maybe you’re of a different generation, Fabio, or maybe this isn’t how exercise physiology is taught in Italy, but surely that expensive education of yours didn’t skip over this admittedly uncreative workaround. The idea that this is an objection to CrossFit is freaking bonkers. I, with my medical degree provided by 7 Raisin Bran UPCs & $10, am willing to put my credibility on the line by submitting that doing “an overhead press” with a piece of PVC piping is not going to result in the sudden disintegration of legions of osteoporotic women. Also, even if it was, there are nearly endless permutations of substitution exercises that people can do if they have some pathology that prevents them from executing the movement safely. CrossFit is not less but more flexible than your average exercise routine .
Norma Loehr, 37, a vice president for a financial services company in New York, was sidelined for a week after she strained her back doing ”Three Bars of Death,” 10 sets of 3 lifts using barbells that weigh up to one and a half times as much as the person using them. She realized the barbells were too heavy, but she didn’t want to waste the seconds it would have taken to change plates.
Once again, this is either a failure of coaching or, more likely, Norma just wasn’t using her noggin. The fact that Stephanie Cooperman thinks it’s remarkable that this woman got injured b/c she was lifting heavier than she knew she could handle is laughable. This isn’t an indictment of CrossFit either. And no, I don’t think that the quantitative nature of the enterprise means that people are really that much more likely to put themselves in danger in order to achieve a particular goal. And not only that, but this woman strained her back and was out for a week! This is hardly a catastrophic injury. I tried to pick up two watermelons at Kroger the other day and had to avoid the gym for three days. Thankfully, I was able to restrain myself from from driving down South and berating a watermelon farmer.
In recent months a group of New York CrossFit athletes have tried unsuccessfully to find a home gym. Joshua Newman, the group’s organizer, said gym managers expressed concerns that they took up too much space, or even that their fast and furious pull-ups would break the apparatus.
‘They used too many pieces of equipment at one time, and we got a lot of complaints from trainers who didn’t like being on the floor with them,” said Eric Slayton, the owner of New York Underground Fitness, a Midtown gym that Crossfit New York called home for a few weeks. ”They put too much emphasis on getting things done in a certain amount of time and not enough on form.”
But for Mr. Glassman, dismissals of his extreme workouts merely help him weed out people he considers weak-willed. ”If you find the notion of falling off the rings and breaking your neck so foreign to you, then we don’t want you in our ranks,” he said.
Were this paragraph not tacked on to an article that consisted mostly of quotes from blowhard doctors with an axe to grind it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. But the idea is clearly that the CrossFit community is full of people like this Joshua Newman, who seems just a wee bit undertrained in the art of not making yourself a nuisance. I think there probably are gyms that would be happy to have people do CrossFit in them, but CrossFit is not meant to be done en masse in your local globo gym. These gyms are designed to maximize revenue by squeezing in as many of the people who do actually show up after paying their 80 bucks a month. The reason you don’t find Olympic weightlifting stations in most gyms is b/c they’re incredibly inefficient from a revenue standpoint. So the idea that you and your closest 10 friends should be able to walk into your local gym and demand to be able to do a daily WOD there is kind of insane. But once again, this isn’t an indictment of CrossFit any more than a group of jerks at your local library listening to 120 db Def Leppard through their leaky iPod headphones is an indictment of Def Leppard. There are plenty of things that are wrong with both Def Leppard and with CrossFit (or at least the CrossFit as promulgated by HQ), but close to none of them were addressed in the Times. Any movement as amorphous as CrossFit is going to have a fair number of morons acting in an unsafe manner, but Stephanie Cooperman’s article does a rather poor job of showing that we should be a whole lot more concerned about CrossFit than any number of other popular regimens out there.
301109 – I am not Kerry Strug
On the list of things I learned tonight is that I’m not very good at ring push-ups. The difference between regular and ring push-ups seems to me to be very much like the difference between Nautilus bench press and free weight bench press. It’s very easy to be complacent about the strength of one movement translating into the strength of the variation, and I was definitely caught unaware by the difference. Just like free weights recruit all sorts of balancing muscle fibers that aren’t used when doing Nautilus, ring push-ups involve an order of magnitude more effort and balance than regular chest-to-ground push-ups. Tonight’s WOD was:
5 rounds for time of:
10 Thrusters 95 lbs (I scaled to 85)
15 Ring Push-ups
Total time: 10min 37seconds
In keeping with a strong desire to avoid hurting myself I’ve pledged that I’m going to scale every time I encounter a movement in a WOD that I haven’t done before. Now, I’ve clearly done both the front squat and the shoulder press variations, but I was nearly positive that I wouldn’t be able to handle 5 rounds of the Rx’d weight without having a serious form breakdown. And I was right. 85 seemed to be the perfect number. I struggled through those last two sets and had a few reps where my form was compromised, but I was able to finish. The ring push-ups were brutal, and I ended up having to do the last 2 sets as regular push-ups. I’m not sure whether not eating lunch was responsible for me bonking so hard (I probably consumed 400 calories during the 8 hours I was awake before the WOD — oops), but I finished my last two sets of push-ups doing 2-3 at a time. It wasn’t from a lack of effort that I ended up that way; my muscles just didn’t have it in them. I was pretty pleased with my time, but I always finish a workout a bit less satisfied whenever I have to scale. I think I finished 4th or 5th in my class of 15 or so, but I found myself guiltily looking around after finishing b/c lots of the remaining people were using the Rx’d weights. Dumb, I know.
“A Few Guidelines for Recovery”
Brian Wilson of Potomac CrossFit has a helpful post up today about recovery techniques, which includes a good link round-up on myofascial release (MR), PNF stretching, and external rotation (ER). He encourages people to make realistic goals that will allow them to actually follow through. No need to tell yourself you’re going to get to the box an hour before the WOD each day to work on flexibility (and soreness mitigation). The journey from couch potato to firebreather is a long one, my friends.
261109 – Special Holiday WOD
Today’s Thanksgiving class was great. It had the same tight, family vibe of the Sunday workout but amplified a bit by the usual pre-Thanksgiving goodwill and fellow-feeling. We had a nice solemn moment listening to the National Anthem before class and then got into the workout. My gym’s instituting a new sign in procedure (right now we’re stuck w/ pen and paper but the idea is to get people used to signing in for when we make the move to electronic sign in), and today was the first day that I forgot. Forgetting to sign in means you get a special treat during your warm-up and my prize was getting to do burpee broad jumps for 3 lengths of the gym. So, after getting sufficiently warmed up, we moved on to the WOD, which was a bit crowded but tons of fun.
3 rounds of:
30 wall balls
30 KB swings
30 pull-ups
The pull-ups were the real killer, and a workout that didn’t seem like it was going to take terribly long dragged on for 20-30 minutes for most people. I finished in just under 20 minutes and am now ready to eat my face off. Have a great Thanksgiving!
251109 – Technical Kettlebell WOD
Today was not really a WOD, at least not in the sense that we were supposed to be pushing for maximum reps or even maximum intensity. We spent the first half of class doing some double kettlebell skills work. Started off just learning how to swing the things without mashing one’s private parts, then moved on to the clean, the front squat and the push jerk. Our WOD was 20 minutes and was ostensibly AMRAP but we were encouraged to take things slowly and make sure that every repetition was done using perfect form. So, the WOD was 20 minutes AMRAP w/ perfect technique of:
1 KB swing
1 KB clean
1 KB front squat
1 KB push jerk
5 pull-ups
I still haven’t done much KB work besides the occasional WOD with single KB swings, so this was a great opportunity for me to get proficient on some of the basic movements with a lighter KB. I started off using the 20 kg but switched to the 16 as the thing wore on and my form started to break. I also hadn’t practiced parking the thing properly since I had been mostly using KBs that were light enough that I didn’t think it was a big deal to simply lower the thing to the ground.
On the lameness of the NY Times’ coverage of CrossFit
I haven’t been immersed in CrossFit for long enough to feel entirely justified in writing the post I want to about the things in the community that I think are annoying or dangerous, but here’s my first in a potential series about crappy MSM coverage of CrossFit.
As soon as my friend Alison got me excited about the idea of CrossFit this summer, I began poking around the internet for information. Like most hobbies I’ve picked up, or large appliances I’ve purchased, CrossFit tickled my obsessive jones for information in a serious way. I was staying up way too late reading message boards and watching videos of movements I hadn’t even heard of. And as a regular reader of the Grey Lady, I also typed “CrossFit” into the New York Times search engine (which, thankfully, is now free all the way back to the mid-1800s) and found a number of articles, all of which were titled in such a way that it was obvious that they were written with a bit of an agenda.
As an aside, I think that part of the background hostility to the program has to do with the attitude of CrossFit itself. For better or worse, CrossFit, at least at the national level, exudes a kind of martial machismo that probably puts people off. CrossFit’s unofficial slogan, “our warm-up is your workout,” is really only the beginning. The more I read the more I think that this antagonistic relationship between CrossFitters and the naugahyde-worshipping hoi polloi stems from CrossFit HQ’s culture, one that can either be embraced or rejected by the various affiliates around the country. More on this later…
One of the things that’s interested me, especially so in light of this recent post by Robb Wolf about his unceremonious ouster as Resident Charismatic Food Genius Guy, is the relationship between affiliates and HQ. I knew that the affiliates weren’t franchises in the legal sense but that there did seem to be a relationship of the sort that required demonstrating some basic allegiances & competencies in order to have the privilege of using some of CrossFit’s intellectual property. The precise relationship is still a bit murky, and I will hopefully have a post up once I can get that clarified.
So, onto the NY Times, which has covered CrossFit on a handful of occasions. There’s one longer and much-commented-upon article from the NYT Magazine called “God’s Workout” and then a shorter piece by Stephanie Cooperman titled “Getting Fit, Even if It Kills You.” From the titles alone you can spot this trope of CrossFitting as a type of religious zealotry, a fanatical desire for fitness so intense that people are consciously putting their lives at risk with every kettlebell swing. I can’t speak for many other gyms, but at HyperFit USA, where I train, I’ve never been part of a less threatening or more safety-conscious workout atmosphere. It’s intense but friendly, and safety is paramount. For people that have been without team sports for the better part of a decade or two, joining a well-run CrossFit gym is like finding an ever-expanding team to workout with.
One phenomenon that journalists are obsessed with is “rhabdomyolysis,” a kind of endogenous poisoning that takes place when muscle fibers break down rapidly and aren’t properly metabolized, becoming released into the bloodstream and eventually harming the kidneys, sometimes fatally. It’s usually seen in victims of extreme physical trauma like car crashes — presumably having your fat older brother fall through your pillow fort and onto your sleeping body will also do it — and it’s most frequently seen in CrossFitters in conjunction with severe dehydration. Anecdotal evidence also seems to suggest that a good recipe for rhabdo is to combine a dehydrated newbie CrossFitter with large amounts of GHD (Glute-ham Developer) sit-ups. [video]
So, in typical alarmist fashion, Stephanie Cooperman’s article starts out with a cautionary tale of one Brian Anderson, a SWAT team member from Seattle who apparently got rhabdo and nearly died after his first CrossFit workout.
Yet six months later Mr. Anderson, a former Army Ranger, was back in the gym, performing the very exercises that nearly killed him. ”I see pushing my body to the point where the muscles destroy themselves as a huge benefit of CrossFit,” he said.
Now, Mr. Anderson may or may not be slightly psychotic, but there’s no attempt in this article to clarify that, well, gee, “destroying one’s muscles” is just a bluntly physiological description of how weight training builds muscle in everybody. You could have easily put this sentiment in the mouth of some circuit training grandmother and it would just as accurately describe the completely uncontroversial and safe process of lifting heavy things repeatedly and breaking down muscle fibers only to see them grow back bigger and stronger.
I’m struggling to see the distinction that this example is supposed to draw between CrossFitters and anybody else who trains intensely, gets hurt (either b/c they were an idiot or b/c getting hurt is simply one of the risks of challenging oneself), and then gets back on the horse. Ms. Cooperman would probably respond that CrossFit is simply more dangerous and more likely to get people hurt b/c of the intensity involved. But just like the Team In Training program would be negligent if they didn’t instruct aspiring marathoners in proper training techniques, CrossFit is only appreciably more dangerous if done without an awareness of the risks involved and zero instruction in proper technique. It would seem to me that even in 2005, when this article was written, and before the proliferation of affiliate gyms, that the large community of knowledgeable trainers and physiologists that populates the CrossFit message boards would make CrossFit safer, overall, than many other forms of unsupervised exercise.
Have these people even been to a gym recently and seen the complete abortion of technique that the average grunting meathead employs? B/c of the intensity, I would wager that CrossFit might be directly responsible for more deaths than, say, a thrice-weekly globogym habit. But as affiliates become more knowledgeable about what leads to rhabdo and pass on that knowledge to their clients, I expect to see cases decline. And of course there’s no mention of the large number of people who have transformed from pizza-inhaling layabouts with bad knees and a one-way ticket to premature senescence into the Platonic ideal of physical fitness and healthy eating. Not a single hint that your average CrossFitter, while maybe slightly more at risk for a cataclysmic cardiac event or a fatal case of rhabdo, is going to be healthier and more flexible and more mobile late into their life.
Now, I personally think that there should probably be a tighter relationship between HQ and the affiliates, and that you should have to affirmatively demonstrate both the capacity to teach the techniques properly and the knowledge to keep people safe once they’ve learned those techniques. The current system sets up consumers to rely on the CrossFit name as a badge of authenticity without the corresponding, well, actual authenticity. CrossFit HQ has a vested interest in making sure its brand isn’t diluted by shady owners looking to capitalize on the latest fitness trend.
More from the NY Times:
The emphasis is on speed and weight hoisted, not technique. And the importance placed on quantifiable results has attracted hard-charging people like hedge fund managers, former Olympians and scientists. But some exercise experts are troubled by the lack of guidance for beginners, who may dive into stressful workouts as Mr. Anderson did. (He had not worked out regularly for two years.) ”There’s no way inexperienced people doing this are not going to hurt themselves,” said Wayne Winnick, a sports medicine specialist in private practice in Manhattan, who also works for the New York City Marathon
Does this ring true for other people? At Hyperfit, the emphasis on technique actually precedes any emphasis on speed and weight hoisted, and maintaining proper technique is emphasized at all times. I don’t know much about the way CrossFit looked in 2005, but my experience is that technique is everywhere a primary concern, especially in the first 1-6 months. The whole point of the prolonged Foundations sessions is to make sure that everybody who steps into the gym is executing the lifts with proper technique and getting the muscle memory dialed in so that that technique will be maintained even as the body starts to fatigue. Sure, a certain amount of technique breakdown is inevitable when lactic acid starts to build up and people are tired. But anybody who’s working out to maximize their gains is going to be struggling through the last few reps of any exercise, and it’s at that point that it’s nearly certain that your technique is going to suffer a bit. But better to do that under circumstances like CrossFit than at your local gym, where all they care about is getting your 50 bucks a month and couldn’t care less if you’re using a spotter or securing the weights before a lift or throwing 55-lb dumbbells back and forth with your buddy.
[To be continued in Part II...]
231109 – Non-stop Stuff
This was my first WOD since last Thursday. My big plan last week was to squeeze in 3-4 workouts from Thursday-Sunday, but as the DOMS set in I realized that I should probably take it easy for a few days. Obviously, I should have gotten into my local globo gym and done some leg work or fashioned myself a homemade WOD in my bedroom, but it was the Michigan v. Ohio State weekend and I wasn’t going to screw around when it came to eating and drinking and generally taking a month’s worth of cheat calories in a single morning.
Tonight was the first time since I really started getting after it a few weeks ago that I dealt with the psychological barriers to getting into the gym. It only lasted a few minutes, but I found myself struggling with knowing that going to the gym was going to be really difficult and exhausting and I was already tired and still sore and kind of wanted to just plop down in front of the TV and watch Chris Johnson and the Houston Texans extend my Fantasy Football team’s lead.
But as soon as I started feeling this way I was able to force myself to imagine how amazing I feel when I get home from a CrossFit workout and am really able to savor my dinner and enjoy my elevated mood. So I just started putting on my shoes. I didn’t even let the fact that the only remaining pair of shorts in my drawer were a pair of mistakenly purchased ladies soccer shorts that really require a pair of spandex underneath to be family friendly but which on this occasion, due to my dire laundry situation, were worn without.
As I walked through the door I saw the familiar scene of many post-CrossFit workouts. About half the class was red-faced and lying in the fetal position, making little rubberized mat angels with the sweat dripping off their clothes. So I knew I was in for something relatively intense. Today’s WOD was:
80 rounds total – 16 rounds of 15 seconds for each of the 5 following exercises (#95/#65)/(24kg/16kg kettlebell)
KB Swings/Hang power cleans/Push-ups/Box jumps(no stepping allowed/Push press
This was brutal. It’s a 20-min workout, but the clock runs continuously. The goal was to get 5 reps of each exercise for each of the 16 rounds, but most people in the class fell a bit short of that. I was able to do 5s on the KB swings & push-ups but had to do 3-4 for the other movements. So, essentially, you’re going full out, balls to the wall for 20 minutes.
The class finished up with 3 rounds of 5 deadhang pull-ups and 10 dips.
091119 – Death by pushing & pulling
I had an incredibly busy first part of the week and didn’t get into the box until Thursday. I roll in and the class is tiny and consists of three other beastly dudes that I recognize from some of the other classes. I think I have a fairly healthy attitude about my current level of fitness as compared to other people (meaning essentially that I know that other athletic guys who have been doing CrossFit for a year or two are just going to perform a lot better than I am). But it’s still a bit humbling when you’re doing a WOD, are the only one doing the modified version and still are finishing after some of the other people.
This WOD was 5 push-ups and 5 pull-ups every minute for 30 minutes. I did my first 7 or so sets doing deadhang pull-ups before I started doing what my coach calls the “Pez Dispenser,” which is what tends to happen when you get tired and start reaching with your head & chin to get above the bar. As soon as my coach saw me doing this he made me get one of the giant rubber bands and I did the remaining sets that way.
I honestly didn’t feel that bad at the end of this workout. I was definitely taxed but never felt the cardiovascular exhaustion that I’m used to feeling at the end of most workouts. I suppose that makes sense, what with the almost 30 seconds of rest in between each set and the strength focus of the movements. That being the case I didn’t feel I needed to foam roll after class, and I wasn’t really sure how to go about rolling out my chest anyways. Turns out this was the wrong move. I was so sore that I found it hard to dress myself for about 3 days afterwards. In fact, when I showed up at tonight’s WOD (the 23rd, a good 3 days after the workout) I was still noticeably sore and tight across my chest and back.
