Green gates MK2

10 ring pulls
10 situps
run 170m
AMRAP 20 mins

This is a revised version of the original wod we did back in october last year (5 pullups, 10 pressups run 170 etc) this time using ring pulls-in various states of scability to add greater demands on the athlete's core.

Jess has a unruly knee

Jess is one of our newbies, she's been training with us for just over two weeks and is seeing progress in her fitness already, but is still at the stage where movements need to be taught and monitored carefully.
Looking at her squat we noticed a knee drop where the right knee was collapsing slightly (by this I mean her knee was falling inwards-not actually collapsing-i.e. my knee cap has dropped off)

There are 4 key points to look for in this movement
1 weight in the heels
2 crease of the hip-where the thigh meets the outer groin area-just below the line of the kneecap
3 the knees track over the feet
4 we keep a nice proud chest to keep the lumbar curve in.

Point 3 was what was causing the problem, no matter how nicely I spoke to the offending joint it really seemed to want to do its own thing.

This was resolved very easily by when Jess was squatting asking her to push her knee out against my hand-often the tactile cue is very helpful with getting newbies to understand how and where they should be in terms of understanding and feeling the movements.

It's vital when learning our movements that we follow Coach Glassman's mantra, "mechanics, consistency, intensity". Without the first stages our efforts are wasted.

The wod in question that derived this long rambling tech heavy blog was Nancy-run 400 15 overhead squats x5.
Sorry for the old phot too.

Percy

Following our adventures in the north I went along to B&Q (not an endorsement-no really) and bought a sledge hammer-not a particularly heavy one-8 pounds in fact-a lighter sledge is often considered better as you can get more swings quickly and thus this affects the intensity of the movement.

Friday aftenoon WOD
1 minute of sledge Vs tyre
1 minute of wall ball
1 minute of pressups
1 minute of situps
1 minute break
3 rounds.

Coral

Deadlift.
1,1,1,1,1.
A nice M E day.

The lack of shoes here is an interesting point-it gets the weight through the heels where we want it, and lots of "trainers" have so much padding in the heel, especially of differing densities, so these would obviously compress at different rates and thus the weight would shift and the lifter looses the feel of where they need to be in this lift-by removing the shoe we can remove the problem, other alternatives we would use (and possibly recommend-although this is by no means an endorsement of a particular product-I'm a size 11 or 45 by the way) would be Chuck Taylors or Vibram Fivefingers-both serve to either have no padding-the fivefingers or a very low heel and consistent density material-the chuck taylors.
The shade of nail varnish is coral.

Fame at last!

http://kettlebellguy.com/blog/?p=1693

Simple Simon

The use and movement of the hip is a vital tool to our athletic ability, yet in facilities outside of CrossFit (I won't call them gyms-although they might) this area is almost completely overlooked and training in a this region is limited to crosstrainer machines and step classes, neither of which have the ability to harness the potential of the hip.
I have previously grumbled about my feelings towards facilities that promote stale, unimaginative, isolationist "exercise" so won't go any further into this here-and may have gone too far already!

And so to our WOD
15 thrusters
15 box jumps
15 sumodeadlift hi pulls
x 5

As you can see all of these movements are big, multi-joint efforts which use the area we're discussing to either propel the bar overhead in the thruster(not out in front-clearly overhead), shift the bar up in the initial movement of the sumo, or to propel our mass onto the box for our jumps.

How I spent my weekend

Had a little road trip this weekend upto CF Manchester and CF North East. This is a video made by Davie (CF Central Scotland) of the team painstorm we did. Thanks again to my friends in the north-it was great to see you all again.

Team Workout at CrossFit North East England from Davie Easton on Vimeo.

I'm not quite finished...

Some more info about what we should actually eat, and what we're being advised to eat.
http://www.againfaster.com/articles/disturbing-counsel.html

Scalability

When people first encounter Crossfit from HQ http://www.crossfit.com the WODs look-well frankly hard-too hard some might argue and feel that they can never do the workouts-this is when scability comes into play-Jeff Martin's gym Brand X offers scaling for everything we do-http://www.crossfitbrandx.com/index.php/forums. So for new girl Jess here the WOD was 10 overhead squats, 25 situps and 75 skips-as it was for Jason, as we can see in the second picture-the intensity scaled accordingly.

CFNI

This was actually a wod that we did a week ago-following the qualifiers for the Crossfit games at Elite 400 (CFNI) http://www.elite400.co.uk/ .
The workout on the sunday was an amrap of row 250m 10 burpees 10 ring dips.
The qualifier Miko Salo, pulled 10 rounds of this, have a look at the link for his stats:http://games2009.crossfit.com/competitors/athlete-profie-mikko-salo.html

"DT"

We saw a new Hero workout today in memory of USAF staff sargeant Timothy Davis, who was killed in the line of duty feb 20th of this year.
We dont see too many new "girls" wods coming out from HQ and sadly far too many "Hero" wods in memory of those who died doing something they believe in.

"DT"
5 rounds of
12 deadlifts
9 hangclean
6 push jerk

rx'd weight for this was 70.5kg for males and 47.7kg for females.

"Paleo in a nut shell"

Got this from my good friend Chet, over at

FuncKey (Powered by Invision Power Board)

Pull!

This week we've programmed a week of the CFSB starting with 3 reps of 5 sets of press, following a challenging warmup-filled with forfeits for some. We followed with a short metcon adapted from the HQ
30 lunges
21 ring pulls
21 situps
20 lunges
18 ring pulls
18 sit ups
10 lunges
15 ring pulls
15 situps.

P and T both demonstrate the scalability of all our workouts-so the same wod is done by all-but with the intensity is moderated according to ability.

Lea

Lea contacted me recently looking to learn more about CrossFit and his desire to learn the movements that appear in WODs from the HQ, and look at the Olympic lifting movements that we frequently use. We broke the 5 hours into 2 sessions-chiefly the bodyweight movements and slow lifts and the Olympic lifts. This really is the best way to learn about the methodology we use and helps to understand why the programme works as well as it does.

Lea did exceptionally well and it was a pleasure to teach him and lead him through his workout.

Fractured Elisabeth
5 power cleans (these would normally be a full squat clean for this wod)
5 ring dips
9 rounds.

Elizabeth would normally follow the 21-15-9 rep pattern-fracturing the reps into fives makes it more approachable, together with reducing the weight and using a negative dip as necessary.
Great work Lea-see you soon!

Love Hate

Deadlifts and Running
15 deadlifts at bw or scaled as necessary
400 metre run
12 deadlifts
400 m
9 deadlifts
400m

These are my new cycling gloves-and it would seem an appropriate title for a wod.

Fight gone bad

I've made sure that pretty much everyone has done this this week-together with Nicole and some "core" work-seen some nice scores too-good work.