Honest.ify

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Thursday April 24, 2014

Prehab

Keg Drill
Fire Hydrants
Monster Walks

Warmup

15 Bird Dogs each side
:30 Side Plank + 10 ‘heel clicks’ each side
THEN 2 rounds:
10 Good Morning
5 Snatch Balance
5 OH Squat
3 Sotts Press

Skill/Strength

“Isabel” for QUALITY:

30 Snatches at a weight of your choosing (135/95 is the normal prescribed weight)
-5 min cap-

Notes:  This workout is typically performed as Power Snatching, but feel free to work on whatever version you want.  We want to see good hip contact and a solid catch position for each rep.  We will provide a 10 minute warmup session.  Go hard, but focus on form and scale the weight as needed.

Partner Conditioning

3 Rounds EACH:
12/10 Calories on the Rower
7 Lateral Burpees over the Rower
-then-
2 rounds EACH:
400 meter Run
-20 min cap-

Notes:  One athlete works while the other rests.  Each athlete performs 3 rounds.  12/10 designates male/female.  This should be an all out sprint!

Cool Down

Down Dog Calf Stretch
Groiner focusing on ankle joint
Doorway stretch

You may have noticed the TV’s on the wall at Venice where the whiteboards used to be. We are entering a new era at PCF where technology has the potential to be a powerful tool to accelerate everybody’s progress, or create an ego driven pissing match that holds everybody back.

“Why the drama?” you may be asking. We will be logging WOD results, and there will be a daily leaderboard. For that reason, I want to remind you why honesty is important to maximizing everybody’s progress as an athlete.

If you are honest about your performance on a WOD, and whether your standards should be given an RX if a judge were watching, then you will have accurate data to track your progress over time and identify areas of weakness to address. If you are honest about your performance every day, the next time you have a judge, you will stop hearing ‘no-rep’. You will also know that you couldn’t do Isabel at the prescribed weight, so you will work on your Olympic lifting. You will start hitting PR’s in the lifts, and any WODs that require them.

If you are not honest about your performance standards (perhaps for the sake of seeing your name on the leaderboard) your self-tracking data will be corrupt and you cannot accurately measure your progress over time. What you don’t measure you can’t manage, so you are hurting yourself in the long run. You will not remember that you didn’t get your chin over the bar for a few pullups, miscounted a few pushups, and did power squats for all 15 reps but still reported that you did Cindy as prescribed just because you finally ditched the band for pullup assistance. You will not remember to work on your pullup strength and squat depth because you did so well on Cindy. Your progress as an athlete will not be maximized an you might find trouble overcoming plateaus in performance.

If you are honest with yourself about your weaknesses, you will be able to better plan how to overcome them. You will see your relative position on the leaderboard as a learning experience, and everyone in the gym is your teacher. What is Ian doing that has earned him his own PR corner on the whiteboard? Why did Indu get a pullup before me? Can you learn from what they’re doing and implement it into your training? Will this also get you a dedicated 4”x4” piece of real estate on the whiteboard to detail your improvements as compared to your past self?

If you are not honest with yourself about your weaknesses, you will not be able to communicate to a coach your needs as an athlete. If you ignre that you struggle with squat depth, you will not ask a coach to help you assess what the root cause is and how you can address it. You might never learn that you are not properly engaging your glutes. You might even stress about your relative position on the leaderboard. You used to be as strong as Fran, but now she is squatting 40 pounds heavier than you and you can’t figure out why.

If everybody is honest about their performances and weaknesses, we will all progress faster. In 2015 when we are looking at the Southern California Team Leaderboards on the CrossFit games site, we will see two teams in the top 30.

Author: Matthew Walrath