Protect your mitts

Rippetoe talking about how to grip the bar in order to avoid calluses. If only someone would post a video about how to deal with the problem once calluses have begun to form......

 

Train like an athlete

I've written posts before about the difference between training and working out. Everyone knows that I believe in training not just working out. But how should we train? Crossfit is "constantly varied functional movements performed at high intensity". That will get you a long ways when you are first starting out. If you come straight off the couch and begin crossfit you will without a doubt become more fit. Your strength will go up, capacity will increase, and body fat will decrease. At some point though you will stop seeing results, the earth shattering gains you make in the beginning will come to a screeching halt.Believe me I've been there. One of two things happens at this point. Either you give up and think this is the best you will ever be and allow yourself to be a mediocre excuse for a human. Or you get pissed off and decide that you're going to find a way to blast through that plateau. So how do we do that Chappy?

You begin to train like an athlete. Athletes do not go into the gym without a plan. The don't make up a bunch of crap on the spot and begin their workout. They don't do workouts because "They're fun!!" They also don't do workouts so that they can tell their co-workers about the workout and watch the reaction from them. They workout to get better at their chosen sport. That means doing shit they don't want to do. If you have a terrible squat, guess what? You need to squat. I hate long drawn out workouts but I do them every week because I need to in order to get better at my chosen sport. The sport of LIFE!

"But Chappy, Crossfit is my sport." OK fine but after a certain point (usually around a year of consistent training) Crossfit won't make you a better Crossfitter anymore. You need a more specific plan. Now I know some of you die hard Crossfitters are thinking that this means you won't be doing Crossfit. My rebuttal to that is that constantly varied can still be goal specific. You won't do the same workouts all the time but all the workouts will have the same goal. See where I'm going with this? If you want to get better you have to have goals. Goals are the reason for doing something. (If you need more input on goals read "On to the next one" from 6/13/12)

So when you begin to stall out in your training and things become difficult. If you're the person that wants to be satisfied with what you have and are content to be mediocre go ahead and stop reading right now! Your kind is not welcome here. Here we are never content to run with the herd. Average is not good enough. We will do what is necessary to reach the next level. And once we have accomplished that goal we will set our sights higher and work to reach the next level. We are the ones that are never satisfied.

Sometimes I miss Globo Gym

Thank You



“The best index to a person's character is how he treats people who can't do him any good, and how he treats people who can't fight back.” - Abigail Van Buren

After spending a fair amount of time in ERs and hospital rooms the last three months I have come to see just how true this saying is. This is illustrated better in no other profession than the nursing industry. Between Penelope being born and Nina getting sick and now our latest endeavor with Bridget we dealt with countless hospital staff. Hands down it was the nurses that took the best care of my family. They were constantly working to make sure we were comfortable, answering our stupid questions, and dealing with our requests and always with a smile. As busy as they were they never made us feel like we were a burden or that they didn't have time to deal with us.

This latest stay was extended because we were waiting for a doctor to come and sign Bridget's chart so we could go home. The surgeons had cleared her to leave, we just needed one doctor to come and wave goodbye to us. As I started to get very irritated and grumpy I realized that our nurse Sara was getting just as irritated as I was. She came into our room repeatedly and apologized over and over and I started to relate with her. At my job we have a chain of command we follow and so did she. I often times have to be the face to the public and answer for decisions made by the chiefs. She was having to deal with the decisions made by this doctor. It wasn't her fault that we couldn't go home but she was the one that kept apologizing for it.

I have a lot of friends that are nurses or CNAs and very often this job goes unnoticed and unthanked. Everybody thanks the surgeon and doctor that took care of your loved one but the honest truth is that if they didn't have a nurse doing all the leg work for them they wouldn't be worth a shit. So even though nurses day is long past this is my thank you to all the nurses in the world. You guys are the ones on the front lines and you don't get told nearly enough how appreciated you really are.

This is what happens when coaches are left by themselves for too long.

On to the next one



Today I want to discuss goals. Goals are very important to your training. Without a goal you are essentially wasting your time in the gym. Everyone that has walked through the doors at the gym has at one time had a goal. It may have been to lose a few pounds, or become a better athlete, or to become a healthier person.  Whatever it was it motivated them to take the hardest step and walk through the door. These types of goals are vague and very subjective. They will get you up off the couch and moving but they have no real obtainable goal. After you've lost those few pounds and feel healthier it's easy to become complacent with your training if you're not careful. So what do we do to combat this complacency? We set objective goals. They can be anything as long as they have an objective outcome and can be reached in a reasonable amount of time. One goal of mine is to back squat 400 lbs. I want to reach this goal by the end of 2012. But your goal may be to run a 6 min mile. Or to bench press your body weight or to fit into your wedding dress again (that's something women are interested in right?). It doesn't matter as long as it is specific.


Ok so we have set our goal, now what? Well we have to formulate a plan for reaching that goal. We need to make a roadmap if you will. The route that is going to get us from where we are to where we want to be. This is easier said then done. Everytime I log onto the computer there's a new workout program out there that is promising to be better than anything that has ever come before it. So we have to gamble in a sense. We take advice from friends, or celebrities, or Joe Schmo off the street and we throw our eggs into a basket and get to work. The key is to follow the program. Whichever program you decide to follow stick with it. The key to achieving our goals is consistency and hard work. I will never hit my 400 lb back squat if I only squat once a month. You're never going to fit into that wedding dress again if you're only watching what you eat 3 days a week and having a food orgy free for all the other 4.

At Crossfit Littleton we have our "Goals" board. It's broken into two halves. 30 day goals and year end goals. The 30 day goals are short term goals. Goals that can be accomplished with a little bit of training and focus. The year end goals are goals that you are going to have to buckle down, tighten up your boot straps and put in some hours on. If you accomplish your year end goal in 30 days you didn't aim high enough. Period! I'm not going to lie to you the year end goal scares the shit out of me. When you put down your year end goal you're committing to a year's worth of work. It might mean that you're coming in early to get in your squats, or while everyone else is out having ice cream and beer (weird combo I know don't judge me) you're snacking on carrots and almond butter. But in order to reach those markers in our lives we have to sacrifice sometimes. Believe me when we do accomplish those goals there is no better feeling. And guess what when you do complete that goal there's always another pinnacle that needs to be reached. When I squat 400 lbs I won't quit working out I will set a new goal of 450 lbs. The instructions for goals are similiar to the ones on the back of a bottle of shampoo. Set, reach, repeat. So choose your goal, choose your plan and get to work. Remember anything worth having is worth working hard for.

Post up your year end goals under the comments section.

INTENSITY

In Crossfit we standardize our workouts, we prescribe the movement, the weight used for that movement, even the time allotted for some workouts. The one thing that we can not standardize is the intensity with which people attack those workouts. The reason for that is because everyone's intensity levels are different. Now I don't want to get into a whole thing about  all of the different factors that play into intensity we are all aware of those factors.


I want to talk about attitude. Attitude is the one factor that affects intensity that we can control. For example a few weekends ago Crossfit Littleton did the workout "Murph" which is:


1 mile run
100 pull ups
200 push ups
300 squats
1 mile run
with a weight vest on


Anyone who knows me, knows that this type of a workout is waaaayyy out of my wheelhouse. I would venture to say that I hate this type of high rep endurance bull crap. Give me power cleans and sprints all day long but I don't even want to talk about what happens to me after 800 m on a run. It's ugly!! In order for me to get my mind right for a workout like "Murph" I have to completely change my attitude. I told myself while this is going to suck for an hour, (it ended up sucking for 73 min and change) I'm going to have fun and just do the work. And while the workout itself didn't do anything to make me a better athlete the mental barrier I had to overcome did.


So what does this mean for your training? The mass majority of crossfitters in the world only want to "get crushed" when they workout. They think that if they aren't laying in a pool of vomit and blood at the end of a WOD then they didn't get a good workout. So what do they do? They skip the strength days, or in my gym when we program strength days we also do a short met-con WOD after it. Some people will fake their way through the lift just to get to the met-con. What I mean is they won't hit the lift with the intensity they should because "I don't want to be tired for the met-con." On days like these the met-con is secondary you need to be putting everything you have into that lift. Don't hold back. BE INTENSE!! When I get done hitting a 5 rm of deads or squats I'm cashed out on the floor laying in that proverbial pool of vomit and blood.




The moral of the story is everytime you walk into the gym BE INTENSE!! And be intense right now, don't worry about what's next. Smash whatever is in front of you and then move onto the next thing and smash it as well.