CROSSFIT LITCHFIELD PARK IS EFFECTIVELY CLOSED FOR BUSINESS.

Due to zoning restrictions in the city of Litchfield Park, CrossFit Litchfield Park will no longer function as a fitness club at 505 Redondo Dr.

We will continue to provide nutritional and dietary counseling through correspondence, and consultation on exercise physiology and effective fitness techniques.

We are deeply saddened by the loss of the most charming, functional and effective fitness facilities in the west valley, but the business simply is not legal in a residential neighborhood.

CrossFit Litchfield Park will continue operations in a commercial facility very soon. Please contact us if you have any questions about our progress towards opening the new box.

The following are modest flecks from my past. Aphorisms never meant much to me; rather, methodological principles and acute cognitive sensitivity were my halos. So pardon the following cluster of aphorisms. Though articulating the truth is no longer my daily habit and obsession - as CrossFit now is - I have not lost my love for hard-earned truths:

Practice only functional exercise * Find peace with the things you cannot change, and be courageous in changing the things you can * Build a lifelong passion for finding the wisdom to know the difference between what is yours to change, and what is not * Respect others’ right to their pursuit of happiness, and protect a republic which affords equal sovereignty to all individuals * Honor people for their virtues, not their weakness or failure; and never tolerate the victimization of the good for being good.

Grandma’s workout: 3 rounds, 21-15-9 & 7-5-3, ring squats and deadlifts @ 75 lbs.

From 20090219-grandma

My grandma had an accident several weeks ago, falling against a curb while visiting my sister in Flagstaff. The pain she experienced (in her shoulder) stopped her from working out for a while. (More accurately, the pain she experienced, and my strange reaction of treating her like my grandmother instead of like a client. If she were a client, I would have had her continue working out. I would work around the injury, probably restricting movement until we could see a return to nearly full range of motion. But she’s my grandma, and my response was to uncritically back off. I was probably wrong.)

Today she returned to exercise. We didn’t concern ourselves with intensity. She prioritized full range of motion and excellent mechanics.

She did three rounds of ring squats and deadlifts.

• Round 1 = 21 ring squats, 7 deadlifts at 75 pounds.
• Round 2 = 15 ring squats, 5 deadlifts at 75 pounds.
• Round 3 = 9 ring squats, 3 deadlifts at 75 pounds.

From 20090219-grandma

We use the ring squat because it enables a client to very easily drop into a deep squat position, and let’s the client choose how much of the work they load onto the arms and the pullup muscles, versus onto the squat muscles. They strike a balance which uses both of these movements, the pullup and the squat. I like the positions involved, the muscles used, the long range of motion, and the comfort and control the client feels.

After ring squats, my grandma moves to deadlifts, and we focus on getting the movement correct and keeping it as consistent as possible.

My grandmother is 84 years old, and we observe on a daily basis both sides of a grim coin. First, her strength and mobility enabling her to continue her life, including picking fruit from our citrus trees, and functioning independently around her home. Second, the inevitable decline that all of us face, and in this, the need to maintain her training, her strength and mobility. She fell recently, and recovered successfully, as you can see from her workout today. But… she fell, and got hurt. At her age, this is not a trivial incident, and the severity of the threat is a direct function of her strength and mobility. She needs these more than ever.

Natasha has been trying to drive me to update our blog. We all suffer for the lack of updates. On her cue, I’ll describe today.

Morning: Navy SEAL candidates Luke, Andrew and Penzo work through a few rounds of the CrossFit WarmUp (CFWU) - opening the hips (overhead squats), closing the hips (GHD situps), pushing (ring dips), pulling (pullups). Luke’s kipping pullups have progressed nicely. Andrew doesn’t have the swing yet, I continue to see a soft midsection and weak lever strength. Penzo is strong and aggressive with pullups, but cheats all his range of motion, stopping with his arms bent almost to 90 degress. He has a good hip snap, but no swing for his kip.

For their WOD: As Many Rounds As Possible in 20 minutes, of 10 reps of 95-pound thrusters and 10 reps of pullups. This workout lays all three low - 5 rounds, 6 rounds, 7 rounds respectively. Luke is recovering from a vicious flu, Andrew and Penzo did a brutal deadlift & burpees workout last night, only 13-14 hours previously.

Andrew cools down by running 15 laps in the swimming pool carrying two heavy kettlebells, one a 73 pounder, one a 53 pounder.

Chad and Jodie are gone to Las Vegas, Stoker and Rayne are absent, so our morning is lighter.

Morning: Russell Harper, MMA fighter preparing for an upcoming fight, does a couple rounds of the CFWU for the first time. He doesn’t do full kipping PUs yet. He made his first attempt at ring dips, then we switched him to bar dips. Today was also his first time trying GHD situps and overhead squats. I keep the GHD situps low-rep to prevent overdosing him.

Russell then executed the most intense, best performance on SUPERFETCH we have ever seen. He tore the WOD up. Throwing a 20 pound Dynamax med ball over his head, sprinting after it, repeating. His throws were the longest we’ve ever seen: he covered the 750 meter distance in only 45 throws, compared to most people’s 75 throws. Every 10 throws, he did 10 pushups (hands on the ball) and 10 overhead squats holding the ball. TIME: 10:17. There was supposed to be another MMA fighter with Russell, who didn’t show.

Afternoon: Wrestling team. I show up early to plan and prepare the workouts, and end up on the mat with one of the wrestlers. I was surprised to find myself breathing hard pretty soon. I also had to remind myself, as always, that I cannot throw elbows to the face, cannot crush his trachea, cannot throw arm bars or head butts. Still he suffered just shy of these ugly consequences. I was frustrated once when I had a decent half nelson on him but was unable to turn him over with it. I also relied too much on my strength, when I actually have the takedown skills to repeatedly hit single legs, double legs and a few sweeps. I hit only one of each of those.

The workouts: separate into partners (opponents). Stand across a 60 meter gap. Opponent 1 does 10 burpees, Opponent 2 does 7 squats and 7 pushups, then they sprint to the opposite side. The workout ends when one guy catches his opponent. The first contest ended in 1:07, after 2 sets of burpees and 2 sets of squats & pushups. The last pair finished in 5:20, which was a long grueling workout. Seven pairs did this workout.

All the wrestlers knew that the losers from the first round would have to do 3 workouts, while the winners would only do 2 workouts. The contests were genuine.

2nd workout: In partners, they wheelbarrow down a 40 meter path, stop and do 20 partner-straight-leg-raises (partner throws the feet back down viciously). Total of 10 rounds, so each person does 5 rounds, alternating rounds. These workouts lasted between 8:20 and 11:15… a long, hard workout, hitting the core, shoulders, hip flexors especially.

3rd workout: Losers from the 1st workout did 3 rounds of 10/10 kettlebell snatches and seven high (38-40″) box jumps (on tractor tires stacked two high). Seven wrestlers did this workout, all finished in similar times between 5:00 and 6:30 minutes.

Evening: no SEALs coming. Two lawyers, GC and Beth, and a woman, Mel, who wants to be a boxer but had to take 8 months off for a fractured carpal. Mel will be introduced to kettlebell snatches, and execute a WOD of 5 rounds of 200 meter runs and 15/15 kettlebell snatches. GC and Beth will do a triplet of front squats, assisted dips and ring rows.

We program workouts individually. My only large group classes are for the basketball teams, wrestling team, and occasionally a large group of SEAL candidates, when I’m working with them as a group instead of individually.

Coach Glassman speaking at the original CrossFit certification seminars (December 2002) on ‘aerobic versus anaerobic’ exercise.

Paraphrasing from this excerpt:

“What’s the drawback of anaerobic efforts?

Discomfort.

I know tons of guys who think that spending all day jogging on west cliff is fun. I don’t know anyone who thinks a 1000 meter effort on a rower is fun.”

“We know that a good anaerobic athlete can put his hands in his pockets and walk up to a five gallon plastic bucket full of water and stick his head in and drown himself, and not pull out. That’s the kind of willpower that’s required to endure anaerobic efforts.

To the extent that you can engage in this and not give up, you will also become supremely fit. Because you are working out in the high power range where the intensity is great, and that focus is where all the results come.”

Bodyweight team workouts: burpees versus sprints

I just gave the following conditioning workouts to a wrestling team. This workout serves as an example of competitive, team programming requiring no equipment. I used a stopwatch, and a 400 meter high school track, neither of which is necessary.

I divided the team into two; Division 1 would workout while Division 2 counted reps. When Div 1 completed the workout, they would switch roles.

Division 1 lines up on the track, divided into pairs by weight class (wrestlers, remember?). Each pair would compete against each other: Steve at 119 pounds would compete against Jeff at 125 pounds, etc.

When I blow the whistle, the sprinters take off around the track, while their partners begin doing burpees. The goal of each athlete is to complete more burpees than his partner. The runners are trying to run as fast as possible, to minimize the number of burpees their antagonist can do while they run.

After the run is complete, they switch. Three rounds. The losers do a second workout: Pandora = 10 rounds of 50 meter sprint and 10 pushups.

I saw the number of burpees completed during the 400 meter run range from 18 to 33 (that’s a lot of burpees to do for 3 rounds). I saw times on the 400 meter run range from 72 seconds to 1:52.

As a coach watching hundreds of workouts, your normal, default, baseline experience is desperately wanting the athlete to go harder, harder — put everything out, leave nothing in reserve, let the workout kill him if that’s how the chips fall. As an athlete doing the workout, I cannot realize that same drive in my own physical experience. That’s what I wish I could do: find a way to bring that disembodied, armchair perspective — for example, there’s only 30 seconds of a workout left, so the athlete should go for broke and lay it all out, just GO GO GO GO GO!!!!… the question is, how do you bring that ambition and drive to your own workout?

These one-legged squats are assisted; they are neither pistols, nor ‘bulgarians’. They are easier and can be used as progressions towards one-legged squats. Here we see Patrick Haskell coaching a pattern of assisted one-legged squats to treat asymmetries:

They might be rehabilitative or prehabilitative. Patrick Haskell demonstrated this exercise and created this video rather spontaneously and for a very specific purpose: to help an athlete with her Overhead Squats, when she demonstrated an asymmetry in her overhead squat. The applications are far wider, however. I find the pattern and the applications intriguing, and I won’t hesitate to endorse this treatment pattern.

We’ve recently executed Diane with clients at a variety of abilities.

First, a wrestling team who has very little time to train technique with me. I was assured they could all hit handstands. I taught them to deadlift in about 8 minutes, where the number one priority was explaining the potential danger of the lift from spinal flexion and thus the first priority, and purpose, of the deadlift in maintaining spinal extension. Necessarily, all of the 14 wrestlers participating in the workout demonstrated safe, competent deadlifts to me, and were required to show that they could respond correctly to two cues: 1) straighten your back! and/or 2) chest up!

Deadlift weights were set at three levels: 135 lbs, 185 lbs and 225 lbs. So, what about the Handstand PushUps, which are abbreviated as “HSPU” in CrossFit?

I gave them three options: First, perform handstand pushups as prescribed (as RX’d): while handstanding with heels against a wall, lower yourself until the top of your head touches the ground, then push back up until your elbows are locked out. A couple wrestlers tried this in the workout; only one wrestler completed the workout with HSPU.

I demonstrated the second option, “handstand dance steps“. In a handstand with heels against the wall, you lift one hand and touch your same shoulder with it, then repeat with the other hand (thus, dance stepping from one hand to the other). Some wrestlers tried this but quickly gave up. A couple crashed to the floor while trying it.

Third option: holding a handstand for 45 seconds. This is quite difficult, but if you cannot execute handstand push-ups, or dance steps, it’s your only choice. The catch is, you must complete 45 seconds in an erect handstand, for each round (substituting that round’s HSPU). This becomes very difficult for the athlete’s counter to calculate if the athlete falls multiple times during the 45 cumulative seconds.

The handstand hold is an “isometric” hold, which means muscles are contracted and loadbearing with no actual movement. Isometric holds are valuable strength exercises, and mostly the province of gymnasts. So when I scale Diane to a combination of deadlifts and handstand holds, I call it “Isometric Diane“.

From 20081228-starbucks

The L-sit (in this case, L-hang) is another isometric gymnastic hold, in this case with an added 20 lb medicine ball.

So the wrestling team mostly did the following as scaled Diane:

3 rounds for time,
15 - 12 - 9,
Deadlifts
45-second handstand hold

Later, Chad and Jodie did a very different scaling of Isometric Diane:

5 rounds for time,
7 deadlifts
30-second handstand hold

By breaking it to 5 rounds instead of 3, I was able to increase the intensity brought to both exercises, and able to increase the cumulative handstand hold from 2:15 to 2:30, and increased the chances they would hit that cumulative total in unbroken holds. I also felt the 5 rounds of 7 deadlifts (totaling 35 reps) would be safer than the traditional Diane RX of 21-15-9, which totals to 45 reps.

From 20090117-venn-diagram

Imagine training a 6′8″ tall professional basketball player in CrossFit. What do you suppose his snatch grip looks like on a barbell? How do his dimensions play to deadlifts? How do the strengths of a basketball player contribute to performances like Wall Ball shots, burpees, clean and jerks, and front squats? And — what of the baseball player? Golfer? Tennis player? Football player? The wrestlers?

The truth is we see greater differences between individuals in all of these sports, than we see between, for example, the wrestlers as a group and the basketball players as a group. There are certainly common denominators within a group’s patterns of movement: lo and behold, a common denominator is keeping the hips lower and needing to move the hips explosively while coordinating aggressive action with the spine and shoulder girdle.

From 20090116

That common denominator is true of all athletic performance, and is essential to the learning and performance of CrossFit movements.

From the trainer’s perspective, it remains true that individual differences are always more significant when discovering and training an athlete’s most efficient and most powerful form and finding the cues that will key the correct movement, or the hitches that are preventing it.

The upshot is gold: the only group difference that matters is athletes versus non-athletes, which is to say, functional performance versus atrophy.

CrossFit’s movements occupy a central position very clearly in the overlap between all variants of performance. I won’t be imperialistic and label the common ground as CrossFit. The common ground is functional movements. CrossFit’s efficacy lies in its exclusive employment of these functional movements; we don’t dilly dally with extraneous, non-functional movements. This fact distinguishes CrossFit most powerfully from systems which, to the gullible, may look similar, like PX90 or HIIT.

Warmups: Natasha has been playing this game for a while, and it took me a couple weeks to catch on. I was missing out! During warmups, she lays out our humble tumbling mats, and has clients doing double forward rolls and standing immediately into five squats. Then they turn around and repeat.

If you’ve tried even only a few crossfit workouts, you’ve learned not to look at something and say “Oh, that sounds easy!” Similarly, don’t underestimate Natasha’s warmup drill. I don’t mean the difficulty; it’s about as simple as it sounds.

From 20090101 Litvinov

There are two points you risk underestimating: First, it’s hella fun, and jumping up giddy and headrushing during your warmup can be addictive. Second, there are great benefits to doing forward rolls that are near universally unappreciated. I believe they deserve regular, habituating performance just like pullups, overhead squats, GHD situps, etc.

Of course forward rolls easily lend to variation: add broomsticks and overhead squats; roll forward then backward; add a kettlebell; roll out of and into handstands… ad infinitum.

Workouts We are scaling workouts everyday, constantly, and it’s unfortunate that we haven’t been blogging this process regularly. I’ll return to that point later. For now, a trivial, distant ramification of constantly adjusting the difficulty of workouts to suit clients is that you develop a game of judging people’s abilities.

My ability to guesstimate, for instance a new client’s time on a completely unfamiliar workout, is good most of the time. I’m often within 20 seconds on a fifteen minute workout. The Farmer’s Walk, however, continually eludes me. (Our long version is called “The Stroll.” It involves carrying two 53 lb kettlebells for approximately 800 meters, and every time you put the kettlebells down, the penalty may be 10 or 20 pushups, and perhaps even 10 or 15 burpees, depending upon complex algorithms I am not at liberty to discuss.) Back to the elusive nature of the Farmer’s Walk. A weak, unfit woman put in the 2nd best time we’ve ever seen, besting a couple rather strong firemen. And a grad student in a psychology PhD program from North Carolina — also unfit and of average strength, not a crossfitter — turned in the most extraordinary performance we’ve seen on the Farmer’s Walk.

The Farmer’s Walk, for the record, is not a workout. We usually use it as a cooldown.

From 20090116 There’s something funny going on in this photo. You may have to view the larger version to figure out what it is.