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The Miseducation of Jimbo Slice
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Talking about my pizza
I’ve just ordered a pizza, so I’m writing ‘til that comes, and then I’ll come back to it…
The obligatory qualification
**I want to open this with the qualification that this is what I took away from the CF L1 cert this weekend in The Unit, CF NI. I’m not saying this is what CrossFit “is” , stands for, or what was taught – but it was my experience.
Complaining about early mornings and the Belfast traffic system
After a 5am rise and 20 minutes of tearing my hair out due to Belfast’s moronic one way system, I arrived to warm hellos at CF NI. As expected, I knew someone there, but there was a room full of 31 other participants to get to know.
The intro & what is CrossFit
Karl Steadman, one of the European HQ cert staff and lead instructor for the weekend opened with a quick intro and outline of what was going to happen. Ran us thru “what is CrossFit” (constantly varied functional movements executed at a high intensity) and then told us what it all meant….
We got a good outline of the importance of relative intensity and later on during the programming lecture were reminded of the importance of scaling effectively to maintain the intended workout stimulus – that essentially everyone should be able to get the same thing out of a workout, just by working at a level appropriate to them (while still hauling ass).
CF wants people to “be better at life” thru a broad, general and inclusive fitness program. The theory being that since we fail at the margins of our experience, we should work on widening our competencies and getting better at the stuff we suck at.
The 9 foundational movements
The movement progressions we were shown was:
squat > front squat > overhead squat
press > push press > push jerk
deadlift > SDHP > med ball clean
I’m not going to labour too much on them since this is mostly a summation for my own purposes, but I want to note how slick the presentations were. For all movement standards it was a description and visual demo of the movement, the points of performances and then the WCGWs.
The big take away was that all the movements broadly included the same things – midline stablisation, force was applied from core to extremity, they were heel driven, had active shoulders where relevant and were done thru a full ROM. The big emphasis on the weekend was that when coaching, there are two things that can NEVER be compromised – safety and full range of movement.
What is fitness? incl. "The Hopper" and metabolic pathways
The movement lectures were broken up by one on the 4 models CF use re: fitness, and a lunch break.
The “what is fitness” lecture was interesting enough, Karl talked to us about CFs 10 general physical skills, how 4 of them are “trainable” in the sense they are physiological adaptation, 4 are “practice” dependent in the sense that they’re more neurological and that the final 2 are what happens when the other 8 get it on – power and speed are produced. I thought it was a really good general overview of the training –v- practice thing I always bleet on about.
We talked about “The Hopper” and how the goal of CF was to build work capacity against broad time and modal domains, so that regardless of what came out of it, you’d be relatively proficient. During the weekend, and from chats with the team over the course of it, they were happy to point out that it’s not the ideal method for sports or specific training – that by its very nature it’s a GPP program and should be considered as such. It was really refreshing to hear because I’m so used to die hard CF cultists acting like it’s the cure for everything.
He gave us a quick run thru of the 3 main metabolic pathways – ATP-CP, glycolytic and oxidative and how CF concentrates mainly on the glycolytic when working with metcons as they feel it’s the one that the biggest overall gain can be made it. Made a lot of sense to me from my own reading around the topic. He also mentioned something about a fourth one, the brooks pathway, which I’m now going to have to go and find out about.
Discussed the sickness/wellness/fitness continumn and how (within reason) you always wanted to work towards increased fitness as the best predictor of general health. I’m reasonably sure this was in the context of a GPP sense, as the pursuit of truly elite fitness in any sport is a pretty unhealthy affair!
Dropping a WOD
That was pretty much the end of our day… and then came our “treat”…
4 man team, 40kg BB – 250 thrusters + 250 pull ups, for time (task orientated ya know!). Horrible right? Well the kicker was the bar couldn’t touch the floor or we all got 25 burpees each before continuing. So 2 dudes had to act like a rack each time. Our team finished first with a time of 19.08 – it was pretty brutal. Then a few beers, a quick chat and back for food and sleep.
My breakfast (it was delicious, thanks)
Day 2 started with a f*cking HYOOOGE breakfast and a good helping of coffee. Thankfully the DOMS hadn’t the time to kick in at that point, they wait til about 4pm.
Technique -v- Intensity, and Threshold Training
We kicked off day 2 with a lecture on technique versus intensity, the end point was that increased intensity (ie doing more work quicker) was a result of good technique and the ability to do stuff as efficiently as possible to utilize the strongest movers in the most efficient manner. We talked a lot about how threshold training and how you want to push people to the point where their form starts to break down, before bringing them back slightly and tightening things up, and repeating the process over and over – this is what I think CF “slop” is. It’s a concept I never really got, but right now I think I understand it a bit better.
Relative Intensity
He also made the point that for a rank beginner, just working your ass off to learn the basic movements can be intense enough. I’d consider myself relatively well conditioned, and after 2 days of it I can see why he said it. When it came to assessing how good a program is, the basic questions were to ask:
-is it safe?
-what does it get you? (efficacy)
-how fast do you get it? (efficiency)
You don’t want to be 100% safe cos it retards progress, but you don’t want to be wreckless either. Sh*t will happen, stuff you can’t legislate for, but the key is to minimize that risk while maximizing the speed at which favourable adaptations can occur. Stimulus is the goal, but that’ll look different and be on different levels for everyone – sometimes you just have to get folks being comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Nutrition is like religion and politics
Jami’s nutrition lecture was really interesting. First thing he said was that he wasn't out to change anyones mind, or say you HAVE to do this, just to think about what's being presented and decide for yourself - I liked that. Ironically I’m starting to fade cos my pizza still ain’t here (I broke and ordered a coke and some cookies too) but I’ll persevere – essentially, the CF prescription (paraphrased) is “eat meat and vegtables, nuts and seeds, fruit, little starch, and no sugar”. He summed it up as “eat real food” – nice eh?
We got to talking about the CF pyramid thing, the name escapes me, but basically on the bottom was nutrition – and everything is built off of that. Food is viewed as fuel (which is something I’ve been doing for a while anyway), but the main consideration to be concerned with is “how does my body produce fuel from this food” – which opens the door to the whole area of hormonal response, insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome and a whole host of other things. I’m actually going to write about this separately because it’s the area I considered my weakest in knowledge and application terms, but right now I’m going to go after a MASSIVE insulin spike because my sugary, starchy goodness just arrived…. NYOM.
BEGIN PIZZA & COOKIES BREAK
9.50pm - to be continued, all questions/clarifications welcome
10.05pm – right, all gone.
END PIZZA & COOKIES BREAK
Continuing on – the pyramid yoke I was talking about above – “theoretical hierarchy of fitness”, thank you Colm.
highway to the dangerZONE
We talked about the zone, and how it many not be applicable to everyone. That you really need to go for it, see how it works, and then start to tweak things to make it more individual specific. I was pretty happy hearing that because I REALLY don’t like the zone rxs. I just think they’re unrealistically low, and if you were to eat the ratios (40/30/30 c/p/f) you’d struggle to get the carbs in eating clean, and the protein is way too low. ANYWAY… the key points were that you need to watch the quantitiy AND quality of your food, avoid excess carbs, avoid inflammation and avoid anything liable to create an autoimmune response. He have us a lot of places to look for more info which I’ll outline in my “nutrition” post.
WODs up? (and how to run a class)
And then it was WOD 2 time…. Time orientated this time…. 7 minute AMRAP, 7x med ball cleans (I actually want to do a separate post on this too, randomly), 50m run, 7 push ups, 50m run – I got 7 rounds + cleans + 50m. During all of this Jami took us like it was a real class – told us about warming up, mobilization, relevant skillz practice, performing the WOD itself and depending on what that was, how you could do other stuff afterwards like stretching, more skillz work, a “challenge” like farmers walks/max pull ups etc etc… something to get people competing and pushing harder. And also the importance of checking on clients to see where they’re at in regards the stimulus they’re feeling, how they think they’re performing etc etc.
How to cheat on your pull ups
Then back inside to learn kipping pull ups with Karl – the key points being that if they don’t display correct tissue control (and ideally at least one strict pull up) they’ve no place swinging about on the bar cos they’re probably only going to hurt themselves. The progression as thought was:
1) kip swing using hands as target (feet tight and point, be able to stop dead in the middle if cued)
2) pull the knees up on the back swing/high knees/created hip angle
3) get on the floor, extend the arms, tuck the knee, ass on the floor, drive the hip up and land in like a bridge with the hip full open
4) get on the bar and try to string it all together
5) at the top, push AWAY to initiate the next rep, preserving the swing (dropping straight down = stopping dead)
Essentially the kip should be a perfect mimic of itself whether looked at straight on or in reverse. I was string reps together decently well, but am still cautious about how my shoulder will hold up to it.
The functional 6 pack ( imo, this it's function is getting lots of girls, fast, and frequently - ie constantly varied & high intensity)
Hit up GHR (it’s a f*cking glute ham raise machine, not a glute ham developer. Dammit it I’ve spent most of my training career as a powerlifter and I’m going to keep calling it that!) sit ups and their progressions after that, and I just realized this post is going to become unreadably long and I’ll need to go back and edit in headers and sections to break it up a bit. Maybe some pictures to keep the idiots interested. Anyway, there’s 2 primary movements it’s used for – flexion and extension.
The extension series was:
1) GHR hip extension (dynamic hip)
2) GHR back extension (flexing spine and restablishing lumbar arch)
3) GHR hip & back ex. (round back, flex hip, extend back, extend hip [which flexes back], extend back)
The flexion series was:
1) ab mat sit up
2) GHR sit up using hands to block ROM and spot
3) GHR sit up getting them to increse ROM
The main keys on points of performance were to aggressively straight the legs on the way up to engage the rectus femoris and lock down the spine rather than having flexion occur, and only going as far as you can before hyper extending your back. He then went on to show us a basic progression, and that he’d only move people to the next level when they could do 25 reps at each of the levels above.
How else would you get from below the rings to above?
Anyway moving on, muscle ups – as anyone who reads my log, or is on my FB knows, I got my first muscle ups a few weeks ago after watching some Jeff Tucker tutorial vids, so I’d learned the progressions and once I got the movement down, they were pretty easy. So Karl showed us the progressions….
1) support spotting the guy by the arms (not the rings, and from the side so you don’t get kicked in the junk)
2) controlled deep ass negative dip, and come up if you can
3) learn false grip (hands thru the rings, on the wrists, bring thumbs in)
4) close the knuckles, bring the rings tight to the chest, tuck the elbows, lean back to extend arms, deep pull w/ elbows to floor, head goes straight thru and you’re in the bottom of a deep dip
5) whip your feet up, if you remain balanced, your’e in the right position
6) do a muscle up
How to nearly fall from 8 feet up
I ended up giving one a crack from full extension w/ turnout at the bottom and got it nicely, and then tried to turnout at the top as well and it all went pear shaped. It was NOT a movement I’d prepared for and probably shouldn’t have tried it bout 8 feet up for the first time. Whoops.
Got my hands on a snatch over the weekend
We learned how to snatch as well somewhere along the way. It was essentially done using the Burgener warm up, and a pvc pipe just in front of the persons bar to prevent it looping out (and make them aware when it does). But it’s a snatch, and I know what that is. So I’m not going to labour on it. If anyone cares –ask me to expand. And be specific cos I’m not talking about it again otherwise. Me and the snatch have history. And it ain’t good.
Programming ...wait, there actually IS structure to CrossFit?!??!
Finally, we come to my favourite lecture of the entire weekend – Programming.
Now, in the spirit of full and open disclosure, I tend to scratch my head and look like a monkey doing sums when I try to decipher CF programming. I’ve learned a lot from Will Heffernan (who’s going to **** the bed seeing his name in what is essentially a CF article) and Mike Boyle when it comes to program design – mainly programming according to bodily function (hip and knee extension, upper body pushing and pulling in 2 planes). So I’ve always considerd the CF style haphazard and silly – unknown and unknowable right?
Anyway, Karl opened my eyes today. I’d looked at some of the named WODs before and seen an element of structure similar to the above before (Fran, Helen, Cindy etc) – but he emphasized the importance of having that structure in general, since you’re TRAINING, but tha every now and again just deviating and doing something at odds with it won’t really matter once you’re getting it right most of the time, basically just avoiding routine.
As mentioned earlier, CF is about constantly varied workouts, using functional movements, executed at a high intensity…. And we look at all 3 elements individually. The variance is essentially GPP, but it’s not a random collection of stuff - it’s structured to cover as many movement, load, time, domain, equipment and envoirnmnet variables as possible, while still having an underlying structure/guidleine, tho most of the work is done in the glycolctic range.
The high intensity element is the threshold concept mentioned earlier – that you work at a relatively high intensity with sound mechanics and consistency good movement, and then step it up a bit to see what happens…
The “functional” movements are weight lifting, gymnastics and monstructural un nature. The emphasis being that if you can’t do the gymnastics/bodyweight stuff first, you’ve no right to try and move external load because any issues are only going to get worse from there under weight. It’s important to avoid heavily eccentric dominany movements with newbie’s cos of the Rhabdo risk (we actually talked about this during the warm up for the team workout on day 1).
Random emphasis area to try and keep your attention - I already told you it was my favourite part and I'm almost there, so deal with the length giggidy
Within the workouts, you should always be looking to scale it as appropriate so that your athlete gets the intended stimulus, just not so that they can finish first and “win” the WOD. The main scale modalities are reducing reps and time, modifying/substituting the movement and changing the weights. During both of our WODs this was shown to us wit the coaches modifying them to suit everyone, and bringing us all in around the same time/rounds. But obviously the guys doing it RX’d are far more bad ass super cool rockstars. I did it all as RX’d, in case you were wondering.
As a basic theory, you want to use primarily triplets and couplets, a heavy day every 3-4 WODs (5-10 sets of 1-5 reps, with either constant weight or working to RMs) and a chipper every now and again to just make sure you’re capable in that time domain. Obviously that prevents problems if you’ve only people training on certain days but if you’re presenting a balanced program, it should all work itself out over time. Oh, and “complementary movement patterns” – that’s the whole pushing and pulling thing again.
Ideally you want to avoid an over exposure to light/bodyweight workouts, a lack of strength days, biasing strengths, skipping gymnastics, mistaking “varied” for “random” and not having adequate bench marks.
The bench mark thing was something I was glad to hear – I remember the old IP “If you’re not assessing, you’re guessing” so I definitely think you need checks and balances which you use intermittedly to asses how effective your programming actually is.
Finally, before the test and wrap up we’d a really quick talk about CF programming and sport – the core point being, more CF in the off season, more sport during the season, and vice versa. Simple, obvious and bloody clever.
Me fail test?
The test – I’m gonna be srsly p*ssed if after writing all of this I fail. Some of the questions were outrageously poorly worded, but that’s the nature of the beast. Should find out soon enough anyway.
How to join the cult
At the close, we were given an instructional on what to do:
-train others
-work with other coaches (and rob the goods stuff they do)
-read the journal
-check out .com
-look at specialist seminars and the coaches prep course
-sit tight for the L2, which sounds like it’s gonna be spicy (managed to fit it in, Karl!!)
Being American
Then we did some chest pumping, a few high 5’s and a big motherf*cking HELL YEAH in true American style…. After the dignified and polite European handshake.
...they were all assholes really
So, I’d a frickin’ cracking time, learned a hell of a lot about CF and coaching in general, picked up a lot of great tips and a much better understanding of what it’s all about. As I said on my FB to someone a short while ago, learning about CF straight from the horses mouth is entirely different to talking to someone about what their impression of it is (which is basically what you’ve just done!!). Definitely a worthwhile experience which I wouldn’t hesitate to an open minded educated individual. I probably wouldn’t START with an L1 if it’s your first exposure to training, mostly because it can be very easy to sit back and accept what’s being said without challenging it and thinking independently, but it’s definitely something that will add to your understanding of the field in general.
…overall an absolutely cracking weekend, I learned a hell of a lot, got a crappy t-shirt, had my faith restored in what I thought CF should be (or should I say CF is actually what I thought it always should be, its just peoples application of it was off). I still think SDHPs are retarded, and will never agree that a cashew should be classed as a carb based food, but hey, considering everything else I got out of the weekend, I can live with that.
I didn't even bother proofing this cos...
-11.08pm and over 3,400 words later....ok so this is absolutely unreadably long, let me go back and edit in some headers and stuff
If you got this far, I both applaud and pity you. Surely there was a more productive use of your time??
Questions, comments, etc etc... Lets hear em. And for once, lets try to keep the CF bashing for bashings sake to a minimum. I think I'm in a fairly unique position in that I've come thru a lot of different training methodologies, learned from some great people and coaches and have a pretty holistic view of the whole training process, and can kind of integrate where CF fits in with all of that. So if you've some myth or issue ya want tackled, shout it out and I'll give you my views.
EDIT: I lost count of the amount of spelling and grammatical errors in here, but right now, I honestly do not care (that's a lie, I care a little bit - but I'm so tired it'll do). I might come back and re-read this all tomorrow, I might not. I'll probably edit if I do. But then again I mighn't. But it's my post, so if you're not happy - bite me.0 -
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Barry.Oglesby wrote: »Oh stop being a little girl.
If I was a little girl I'd be pulling my deadlifts round backed!
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I like the clean drill. I actually learned a bit about fully extending at the CF cert on med ball cleans of all things, so I'm trying to bring it across to my normal cleans. I definitely felt faster under the bar today.
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You're killing me here. You learned how to fully extend with a med ball clean at the CF cert? What did they teach you when you were in hercs
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You're killing me here. You learned how to fully extend with a med ball clean at the CF cert? What did they teach you when you were in hercs
It's been almost 18 months since I trained in Hercs, I'm only back cleaning about a month - sometimes knowing the concepts and actually applying them are fairly different things.
....you can see that in the main forum - lots of people who know stuff, but can't apply it.0 -
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I don't think the cert is all that usful unles you are targeting KB courses.
I was talking more about the test lone.
I've 80 snatchs with 20kg, 100 w/ 24kg feel totally out of reach unless I can increase efficiency
Ahhhh kk I see. I know I need A LOT of KB snatch tekkers work. Might start to introduce it as part of my pre-WOD work.the drifter wrote: »no hassle dude...let me know when your under 80kg
Let me know when you're as lean as me at 90 0 -
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<<...in a hopeless place>>
Warm up
Cossack squats
Thoracic mobility
Skillz
"Tall" power cleans/dead hang power cleans:
40kg x3
60kg 2x3
80kg 5x5
Metcon
40kg push press x10
24kg KB swing x15
400m run
5 rounds in 13 mins 38 seconds - Max HR 190, Average 185
Felt rubbish all day. Must be needing more kcals or something.
The warm up was nice - starting to "get" the cossack squats now. Really feel like they're opening my hips up nicely.
The high hang/dead hang/tall power cleans are really something i'm working on to fix my extension issues. I knew they were bad but only copped on as to HOW poor it was over the weekend.
The metcon was pretty brutal. I gassed very very badly on it. It was fun tho. Heavy squats tomorrow
...actually, that's nothing to smile about at all. I fully expect to be pathetic!
EDIT: 2,500kcals. 302g protein, 108g carbs, 92g fat - decent.0 -
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The long duration stuff programmed are a 5k, Cindy and Murph.
I’ve tried to add in some “gymnastics” elements like HSPUs, MUs, squats, ring dips etc etc… I’m gonna have to whip pull ups out or just do like 1/3 to ¼ of my planned reps and do em strict because my shoulder’s not having any of it.
The workouts broadly alternate between time and task orientated (ie doing stuff for X amount of time or doing stuff for X rounds). And go couplet, triplet, strength with the 3 longer duration ones just dropped in randomly.
The pullups idea sounds sensible. Keep hearing about shoulder niggles from CF-ers and the prospect of a SLAP tear never sounds nice. I guess identify what stimulus a kipping pull up gives you and replace- though what is there with an upper body pull that replicates this? Some kind of not-stoopid row? Maybe even high intensity rowing? (Mind boggling here).
Regarding the kb-swings are you going to head level or chest level? Seems like the CF swing has a lot of detractors (not really sure why).
Though when you start de-stupiding everything suddenly its veering dramatically away from CF! 0 -
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The pullups idea sounds sensible. Keep hearing about shoulder niggles from CF-ers and the prospect of a SLAP tear never sounds nice. I guess identify what stimulus a kipping pull up gives you and replace- though what is there with an upper body pull that replicates this? Some kind of not-stoopid row? Maybe even high intensity rowing? (Mind boggling here).
Yah see there's nothing that really fulfils the "move large loads, long distances, quickly" requirement that won't be limited by something like grip/acute muscular fatigue, so it may not be possible to maintain the same stimulus.
Potentially I could do somehting like Pendlay rows, or (strict pull ups + inverted rows). I may have to just ignore pulling altogether during metcons and use weighted chins as an assistance exercise. I shall modify as I go in that regard.Regarding the kb-swings are you going to head level or chest level? Seems like the CF swing has a lot of detractors (not really sure why).
Chest - the way they should be done. F*ck that high swing shoulder tearing sh*t.Though when you start de-stupiding everything suddenly its veering dramatically away from CF!
And here's where it gets interesting... I'm programming EXACTLY as we were advised during the cert, I'm just doing it sensibly (hopefully thus proving my point that CF done well can work, and the issue lies with the coaching and not the program itself).0
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