Blog Archive

In an age of doping and steroids, I love this guy’s story. Check out this cool article about the unassuming Cliff  Young.

He was the real deal!

Today’s Skill/Strength Element:

BackSquat 5 X 5

Today’ Workout:

25 Hand Release Push Ups

25 KettleBell Swings

Rest

4 Rounds, rest the same amount of time it took to do the HRPU + KBS  (1:1, Work:Rest)

A

Audrey Tannant Business Development Manager Crossfit Vancouver / Madlab School of Fitness

Sent with grammatical, autocorrect, and spelling mistakes from my iPhone

Saturday Lesson Plan

Warm-up: (10min)

400M run
200M farmer walk (up the short alley)
400M run

*athletes – select farmer walk weight and have it ready before the first 400M run.

Tech: (25min)

Barbell Turkish Get-Up - work your way up to a heavy 1 rep max.

W.O.D. 40-30-20-10

Wall Balls (20/14)
Burpees
Knees to Elbows

Sunday Lesson Plan:

Make up day… come in and hit one of the workouts that you missed this week. Tuesdays front squat/box jump or Thursdays deadlift/double unders were both pretty awesome if you missed either one of those!

Have a great weekend… Ben, Bill and Patty signing out!

Babies bring out the happy in people!  Make one smile and your heart warms.  Make one laugh and you heart melts.  Now imagine that it’s your own baby who’s happy and playing and smiling.  You’ll end up in a full body glow.  And everybody is somebody’s baby.  So get out today and give your parents a gift.  Laugh, play, smile, do something that makes your life better and know that it’s making someone get a little more glowy.

Friday’s Lesson Plan:

Warm-up:  4 rounds

4 lengths waiter walk (2 each arm)
10 Box Jumps
Accumulate 30 seconds in a support hold on the rings

Tech: Snatch

Work through the Burgener Warm-up with an unweighted barbell then warm up to working sets as follows:

(5,5,3,3,1,1)
Work the weight up a little for each set.

WOD:  Team Amanda

9-7-5
Snatch (135/95)
Muscle-up

Partner A does all 9 snatch then partner B does all 9 snatch.  Then partner A does all 9 muscle-ups followed by partner B doing all 9 muscle-ups.  Partner assisted muscle-ups are the suggested progression but don’t make it too easy on your partner; make’m earn it!

When we kicked off Project Endurance we talked a bit about the importance of having a goal, or a goal race to focus on.  We are starting on Week 7 of our 10 week journey and I have a couple upcoming races for you to consider.  Both are cross country races (that’s XC for those of us in the know!).  Cross country races usually have a really laid back vibe.  The courses have variable ground conditions, think trail run lite.  You may see some trail, grass, sand, standing water, hills, and paved sections.

There are two options for you, both XC races are located at Jericho beach park.

The first is the community race that they run as part of the Canadian National XC championships.  Jenn Schutz from UBC Track has been feeding us some programming ideas and also hooked us up with details on this race.  You can run, and then stick around and check out the XC championship race.  The community race is a 5k.  That’s coming up on Nov. 24th.

http://www.raceonline.ca/events/details/?id=290

Here is a little map of the course they are using for the championship race, it’s probably similar for the community race.

http://www.xcountry.athletics.ca/course-map.php

The second is the XC race that I talked about in an earlier post.  It is the Gunner Shaw Memorial XC Race.  It’s a two loop, 10 km race.  I’ve done it before and loved it.  Check it out!  Both you should be able to sign up for day of, or you can register online.

http://www.lgrr.com/gshaw/

Enjoy this week!  Post up thoughts and comments from the workouts!

Cheers, Afghan

“Sitting for long periods of time — when you don’t stand up, don’t move at all — tends to cause changes physiologically within your muscles. You stop breaking up fat in your bloodstream, you start getting accumulations of fat … in your liver, your heart and your brain. You get sleepy. You gain weight. You basically are much less healthy than if you’re moving.” - Gretchen Reynold

Now surely this doesn’t apply to us.  We’re Crossfitters!  We’re active.  Strong.  Fit.  We eat healthy even!

While sitting may not be causing obesity in you it can still definitely cause changes within your muscles.  And today I want to conduct a little in-house experiment to see just how much.

Today’s leaderboard is your maximum vertical leap.  Sitting affects your jumping muscles in two major ways.

1.  It shortens your hip flexors by putting them in a constantly shortened position.  These short hip flexors in turn act as a braking mechanism slowing down or eliminating completely your terminal hip extension, which is crucial for reaching your maximum vertical leap.
2.  It mats down and junks up your posterior tissue quality by putting them under heat and compression all day.

Thursday’s Lesson Plan:  In two parts.

Part 1:  The Experiment (25 minutes max)

Warm up your jumping muscles with the following barbell sequence 4 times through with an empty barbell:
5 dead lifts
5 hang muscle clean to overhead press
5 back squat

Then we’ll take our first crack at the vertical leap.  After you’ve taken a couple of attempts we’re going to spend 10 minutes blasting our hip flexors and rolling out the glutes and hamstrings.  And I don’t just mean give the hip flexors a little stretch.  I mean turn those mother f’ers off!! Spend 2-4 minutes minimum on each leg in the couch stretch.  The rest of the ten minutes use to get a lacrosse ball, foam roller or other torture device worked in on your tight hammies and glutes.  Warm the jumping muscles back up again briefly and then re-test.

Important Note:  Your leaderboard leap is done without a drop step or run up.  Feel free to test your leap with a step in or run up but those won’t count for the leaderboard/fitness rating.

Post to comments how much difference is made between the attempts from round 1 and round 2 and also let us know how much time you spend sitting each day.

Part 2: Spend 10 minutes warming up your dead lift and get ready for today’s WOD.

3 rounds for time:

10 dead lifts (275/165)
50 double unders

10 minute time cap on this one.  Pick a weight that’s tough but you can still blast through without too much rest.

Much love,

Bill, Ben and Patty

p.s. No 6 p.m. class on account of Mad Lab!