New Website!!!!!!!!

I’ve moved again!!!!!!!!!!!!

Check me out at  http://www.aaron.potomaccrossfit.com/

I’m staying at this one for a while, so now that the move is complete I want to write a bit more.  Stay tuned!

Back Full-Time

(Proper POSE Running technique?  Much like Ferris Bueller, “I never had a lesson.”)

OK, I’ve stopped recovering and will now probably proceed to work out too hard for the next two weeks in the run up to a 2 week lay-off.  Good times.

What I really want to do right now is make sure that I am practicing at least one thing I am bad at every day.   Here is a rundown of what I have done since Tuesday.

Tuesday

Snatch Practice up to 115 and reps at 95

3 Rounds

5 HSPU + 21 KB Swing (53lb)

Rest 1 minute

2x250m Row Sprints + 1 minute rest

Rest 1 minute

20 burpees

Wednesday

“Chief Like”

3 Power Clean 155lbs + 6 Push-ups + 9 KTE

13.5 Round

Thursday

3 Rounds

15 DL (225) + 15 DBPP (50lb) + 25 Double Unders

7:13

Then a few sandbag cleans and carries

So in those days I managed to hit snatches, HSPU, push-ups, KTE, burpees all of which are on my goat list.  Not bad.  And I stretched!

After the Games

The whole weekend was quite an experience.  In the end, I confirmed what I should have known already.  There are a number of things I am very good at, but there are a sufficient number of things that I am bad at, it caught up to me in the end.

I was 4th place after day one and 6 people were qualifiying.  All I had to do was hold on, but I didn’t.  I was beaten rather badly in the last event and dropped into the 20′s.  But I am more dedicated than ever to focusing on my weaknesses.  This is the entire point of CrossFit and I have always known this, but it is driven home when the result of having not done it is having 200 people watch you as a spot to nationals slips through your fingers.  I’ll be back next year.  Bigger, stronger, faster.

And to get there, you will see me doing a lot more pressing, snatching, handstands, ring work, and stretching.  I’ll keep you updated on my progress.

As for the competition itself.  Workout 1 was Running, overhead squats, and box jumps.  I placed high in this, which is part of what pushed me into the 4th.

Workout two was a 2k row, which was pretty boring and I have no pictures for.  I rowed a 7:04 which is very passable.  It wasn’t going to hurt or help me much.

Workout 3 was deadlifts and double unders, which are two of my best movements.  I finished this one near the top and made up a ton of ground on people.

The last workout, the one that took me out of contention, was snatches and pull-ups.  I’m good at pull-ups, I’m bad at snatches.  Lucky for everyone I don’t have any pictures of that one.

Be ready for some long boring posts on my snatch progress.  Good times.  You may also get some boring video on the same thing.

Strategy

Yesterday was a great example of the role of strategy in workouts.  I have two examples.

First, Annie is a workout of double unders and sit-ups.  Double unders are great if you can do them fast, but better than fast is if you can do them without messing up.  Better to NOT miss a jump than to go super fast but mess up 5 times in 50 double unders.  So slow down if it means you can do them consistently.  The difference will be only a few seconds.

Second, we did 50 chest to bar pull-ups.  Since we came to them off a row, we weren’t fresh.  If I’m fresh I can do 20 or so (ok, 18).  This time I did 10.  Not bad, but it left me shot.  Because of being a little too aggressive I hurt myself from rep 20-40.  If I had gone a little more slowly, I might have finished all 50 faster.  Lesson learned, and hopefully applied at the games.

Workouts yesterday were

50-40-30-20-10

Double Unders

Sit-ups

7:09 (Not a PR, but OK)

Rest

500m Row

50 Pull-ups Chest to Bar

500m Row

Ate ok.  I am a little less worried about the carbs since I want to ensure recovery, but I don’t go over the 40% of Zone.

The Excitement Builds

Lots of new information coming out on the games.  SoCal has their events out and Great Basin does as well.  We found out our event will have at least one “outdoor event.”

I like how the two new ones set up there events.  I would basically get crushed in one region and do pretty well in the other, but that’s my fault for having big lagging areas in my CF Game.  I can’t exactly fix those this year, but there’s always next year

It does mean I will have to think a lot about workout strategy.  I’ll need to find ways to minimize those weaknesses and push on areas where I can make up time or pull ahead.  I am NOT good enough all around to just go 100% at everything.  In a workout it is a good idea, in the competition strategy is important.

I have maintained pretty good eating habits so far and my elbows are feeling better after a day off.  I’ll do the WOD and a little extra practice today and see how sharp I feel.  If something hurts I will probably do something else that doesn’t.

And if you need any extra motivation, check this out!

Training and Tapering

Now this is an interesting concept.  How do you stay sharp, avoid injury, get rested, and stay at the peak of your ability for a competition.  The answer is … I don’t have the answer.  If I did, I would have millions of dollars coming in from all of the terrible runners out there who are convinced if they taper properly they will turn their 28 minute 5k into a 27 minute 5k.  And good for them.

But I believe the truth is that there still is not a great deal known about tapering and rarely is it scientifically investigated.  Complicating this is the fact that we deal with different sports and events which have different demands on the body.  How marathoners taper is different than power lifters, is different than football players, is different crossfitters.  It is left to a great deal of individual preference, superstition, placebos (which is not to say those are not important).

Ben Johnson (a fast man whether he juiced or not … he did), thought heavy bench press was a perfect workout before a 100m race.  Ummmm, ok.  Marathoners will run 400m repeats in the weeks out.  They could tell you why, but it wouldn’t make any more sense than the marathoner that only runs at race pace or does light jogging in the week before.

With all the conflicting advice, I will throw in my own.  However, I will be so basic that hopefully the tenets I lay out will be a floor of the things all people should and shouldn’t do.  These are the basics.  Try to not violate them and you should be ok.  Here my thoughts on what to do in preparation for the regional qualifiers.

(As an aside, I am treading a fine line here because I am basically saying overthinking this will kill you and then I am thinking enough about it to write a blog post.  I’ll try to tread carefully).

First, do no harm.  If you injure yourself two weeks out, that sucks.  And it was probably unnecessary.  Why?  See point two.

Second, it is highly unlikely you will significantly improve your fitness in two weeks if you have been steadily training for any amount of time.  In other words, don’t trick yourself into thinking if you work extra hard in the next two weeks it will greatly change your fitness level and put you at your peak.  It takes many weeks for adaptations to occur in the body usually, especially if you are a regular trainer.  The progress you made was in the last year, not the last week.

Third, don’t wear yourself out.  I’m not talking injury, I’m talking that feeling where you’re on your ass and can barely move because you are so fatigued.  Now is not the time to get a mild Rhabdo case.  It will leave you drained for the competition, suseptable to injury, suseptable to sickness, and generally sap your energy.

Fourth, don’t sit on your ass.  Taking two weeks off, though preferable to getting hurt or sick, will leave you rusty, achy (one great irony of taking time off is that you notice aches and are convinced something is wrong … this is largely paranoia), and sluggish.  If you perform complicated moves in competition, those can get sloppy.

You’ve noticed a lot of DON’Ts so far in this post.  I’m glad that is not lost on you.  It is much easier to do something stupid than find the magic and greatly improve your performance.  So what should you do?

Do rest more than you usually do.  Not sure how much as it depends on you.  But your level of rest should be higher than when you are usually training.

Do continue to practice important movements.  Stay sharp by practicing your snatch, for example, without going super heavy or doing a stupid number of reps.

Do eat a little better than usual (or a lot if you don’t eat well), but do not make significant changes to your diet that have unknown effects.  Now is not the time to start taking new vitamins, experimenting with creatine, exploring the wonders of Indian food (unless you eat that all the time now).  Eat as you usually do … only better.

Do sleep.  Sleeping the night before is not only insufficient, it is improbable.  You will have enough nervous energy you will sleep like crap.  Accept it.  Luckily, one bad night of sleep won’t kill you if you have been sleeping well for two weeks.

Similarly, do hydrate.  Drinking a bunch of water the day of/day before will do you little good.  Hydration happens in the weeks before.

How am I implementing my own advice?

I have been a little achy lately so I will take extra rest, preferring to feel healed than injured.  I must remain rational and recognize that even cutting my training volume in half for two weeks will have little effect on fitness, but it may help me feel better.  This is on top of the two extra days of rest programmed, the planned easy days, and total rest the day before game day.

My workout schedule for the next two weeks should have no workouts over 10 minutes, some heaviness, but no 1-5 rep maxes, and I am avoiding things I know make me sore for a while.

I eat pretty well, but I am cutting out most drinking and not being afraid to eat a little extra.  I will purchase my Easter candy now and eat it as a reward post-games.  I love Robins Eggs … seriously, they are like the best thing in the world.  I’m glad we shared that little moment.

I am practicing things I think will come up in the games and have set aside two days to practice movements once the events are announced.  Practice, without killing myself.  Not even necessarily incorporating them into a workout.

I will, however, have at least 6 days at the gym in the next 10 or so, so it’s not like this is all rest and no play.  You have to stay sharp.

That was way to long.  I have no cool pictures to include.  I am intensely curious how this will all turn out.  Next year I will probably plan this for a much longer time.  If I find a good picture I’ll include it later.

Back Online!

I was having technology difficulties, but I think I have them worked out and you may soon be seeing a new website from me. In the meantime, an update.

200lbs was not what I thought it would be. The day after I wrote that post I was 198. The next day I was 195. The next day I was 192. I seemed to have stabilized around 193. Hopefully what that means is that I gained 3lbs of hard earned muscle. At least that’s what I hope.

Other updates include ort little competition last Saturday. Getting judged and working out with a bunch of folks right around your fitness level is pretty exhilarating. Doing it twice in one day can beat you down, but that’s what we’ll be doing at regionals, so best to know what it feels like. I did about as expected. On the heavy overhead plus ring dip workout, plenty of people did better than me. I caught up on the burpeee/pull-up/row workout (shocker), but certainly not enough to catch the guys in front, and still only the third fastest time. Hopefully the overhead stuff went a little better than usual because of a few extra pounds and some focus. I’ll test that theory more. I have focused less on my press and more on my dynamic push-press and push-jerk since I really only care about getting weight over my head and not how it gets there.

My shoulders are also feeling better (knock on wood) and my chest to bar pull-ups didn’t suffer too much from the lay off. I’ll be hitting those pretty hard for the next couple of weeks since it is one of the only things I am more that 50% sure we will have to do at the games.

I’ve also got some good pictures coming. Well, not good pictures, but pictures nonetheless.

Workouts we’ve done lately that I like:

3 Rounds
10 Clean and Jerk (135lbs)
15 Ring Dips
20 KB Swings (53lbs)

21-15-9
Burpees
C2B Pull-ups
Row 500m (each round)

5 Rounds
Row 200m
5 Hang Squat Clean (155lbs)
10 Burpees
Rest 2 minutes

This last one was brutal. The inclusion of rest makes you go that much harder. 2 minute bursts of MAX POWER.

Topic for next time: how to make rowing matter when doing doing WODs. Ricki Frausto has a good idea.

Finally, 200lbs. Now What?

Well, after many months of hard work and big eating, I have made it to 200lbs. Some of this is clearly fat as Erika has pointed out the return of my double chin (an unfortunate artifact from my mother’s side of the family). Here is a quick rundown of how this progressed.

Last summer I was quite lean, tipping the scales at about 183. I found I was not only hitting walls on my strength stuff, I was gassing during metcons as well. I had been doing some intermittent fasting, eating pretty clean, and probably drinking a little too much. Since part of my goal for being lean was to improve on those metcons, I decided I needed to do something about it. The video below is of me a little leaner and lighter. One would have though I would be moving a little faster given my size. Notice that I am NOT, in fact moving faster. The 1:30 to 2:30 mark is a good example.

I still have trouble embedding video, so here is the link:

http://vimeo.com/1286882

Oddly, people said I LOOKED bigger at this time which I assume is the result of my muscles being more prominent, though less useful. My solution to this was to increase the amount of food I was eating, paying little attention to blocks and just trying to eat as much meat, veggies, fats, and fruit as a could. I IMMEDIATELY gained about 7lbs and stabilized at 190lbs. It was a decent place to be. This also coincided with PCF feats of strength month. I improved on my big lifts increasing from something like 870 to 915 on my CF total, and set Fran PRs as well. My Cindy did not improve as much. People may have mentioned I looked a little bigger, but not that often. i didn’t feel much bigger.

This is more representative of how I looked at this point.

Because of the trouble I was having with overhead lifts, I decided to take it to an extreme. I tried to eat 5x fat (nearly 300g of fat a day) and up my total calories to as close to 5000 as I could. I usually topped out at 4300. I drank milk, though no where near a gallon. I did not resort to eating bad foods, so still little sugar/bread/starch, though I may have cheated a bit more often. At this point people said I LOOKED bigger. My BF% went up and I made a bit of progress on my lifts. Not a ton of progress. I tried to lift heavy a little more often. Where it really helped was in being able to maintain at a higher pace when I was dealing with heavy weights, so high rep squat cleans improved as did moderate rep 155lb overhead stuff. I don’t feel like there are great pictures to demo this stage other than a few in which I just look like I have a fat face. I guess you can tell I’m not as lean in this one.

So now what? Hopefully I put on about 4-8lbs of good muscle over this experiment and can keep it as I shed some fat in prep for competition.

I will do a lot of updates on this though they may be short. I’ll let everyone know how it goes. Hopefully I stabilize at a LEAN 193-195lbs. We shall see. maybe next summer it is time to try a gallon of milk a day!

Shoulders and Progress?

I am having a hard time testing myself lately. My shoulder is bothering me which means two of the things I want to improve on I can’t really do: chest to bar pull-ups and overhead pressing. It is feeling better so I’ll probably ease back into it. You can see in the picture above how I switch my grip to protect my shoulder. The sore shoulder has a suppinated grip to avoid too much movement back behind my head on the downward portion of the swing. Now I have to switch my arms to protect the other shoulder and it will take some getting used to.

In the meantime I am doing more strength work and FEEL good but haven’t maxed out in a while. I am carrying 5-10 more pounds around on me and that probably helps. I haven’t noticed a drop off in bodyweight workout performance yet, but we’ll have to see if that remains true.

The next few workouts should be good tests for me. I have about 3 more weeks of big eating and then I am going to cut back and really think about practicing for the games rather than working out to get in the best shape, if that makes sense.

I need to post more pictures. I am lacking.

Strong Enough

I stole that phrase from Coach Rip, but it’s not like he’ll ever read this blog so I’m not too worried.

Well, as Jon Welborn (our crossfit football expert/player) said, it is always better to be bigger and stronger. I tend to agree with his assessment. However, I’ll ask this question: how does one measure strength. What I have decided is that I am willing to sacrifice some of my 1 rep max for a given lift. I still hope this will improve, but I am not focusing on it and it will probably go up more slowly than if I trained like a power lifter.

I am instead focusing on upping the number of times I can do a given weight very near my limit. Again, I am not one of those people who thinks it is not important to get strong or who does not recognize that improvements in the one rep max crossover to higher reps. However, I also know (and work by CF coaches much more experienced than me like Jeff Martin at Brand X) that CrossFitters are compressed at the upper end of their strength. Our 5 rep max is closer to our 1 rep max than most. We recover from a max effort faster than most.

This only makes sense. Given the amount of high rep work we do, we are bound to see improvements in muscular endurance. Jeff Martin has done some work to bring a kind of organizing principal to this in his strength program. One of its defining characteristics is the inclusion of a max effort set of 15-20 reps. I don’t see this as an abandonment of the quest to get bigger and stronger. Nor have I determined that I am “Strong Enough.” This is another way to attack my weakness which is, ironically, weakness. I want to get better at CF workouts. If my max jerk only goes up 10lbs but I manage to go from breaking sets of 5x155lb jerks to doing them unbroken, I am happy.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

In other quick news, I have set a big PR in Elizabeth. I bring this up because it is a good example of improving my endurance at moderately high weight. My 21-15-9 of 135lb cleans went much better than last time when I almost DNF’d due to extreme back pain. I probably should have stopped. The rest of you should NOT follow my lead on that one. Also set a Fran PR at 3:09 and a weighted pull-up PR at 117lbs. Pull-up was solid and no doubt. Fran was very good, but I notice that even when I’m all the way up and you can see my ear past elbow, I have a slight crick in my elbow. This is a product of shoulder flexibility more than anything else and does not really shorten the range of motion, but is not clean and leaves more doubt than I would like. I will address it.

Random thought for the day: squat clean thrusters are an awesome exercise and I want to do more of them. Discuss.