The Writers Block

A while back someone asked me if my goal for my workouts was to get good at CrossFit.  The answer is no.  For me, CrossFit was (and is) a means to an end.  That end is “fitness.”   The big problem is how do we define fitness? Well I admit I suspect a lot of what passes for “fitness” is actually culturally driven.  But that bias aside CrossFit has the “10 Modalities” which is probably as a good a definition as any.

At the beginning of my CrossFit training I told myself ” just do the WODs!” (99.9% of which I scaled way down) and I assumed that I would eventually figure out what “fitness” actually meant to me.  Well not so much.  I didn’t have a particularly clear goal, and the modalities were a bit too abstract to be useful.

The good news is that CrossFit does provide a way to measure relative fitness by having everyone do the same workouts, and publish the scores for comparison. These are the named WODs.   And of course that helps.  But for me there was still something lacking — a specific goal.  To put it another way, how would I measure my fitness?

Among the many WODs that are out there, the one that stands out for me as the best example of true fitness is “Cindy.”  The Cindy WOD is 20 minutes of 5 kipping pullups, 10 pushups, and 15 air squats — do as many reps as possible in 20 minutes.

After thinking about it, I decided that the easiest way to manage and measure my goal of peak fitness (besides focusing on VO2) was to emulate athletes who had proven themselves to be capable (an idea I’ve mentioned before.)

And that brings us to Josh Stonier.  Josh is an exceptional athlete, and among the many things he excels at is the Cindy WOD.  He does 27 reps in 20 minutes.  Now that is incredible.  The last time I tried Cindy I did 11, and I thought I would pass out (several times!)  It was grueling.  So a score of 27 for Cindy is awesome.

So let’s use Josh as an example of how to set a fitness goal.  I think the first best step is to set the problem up correctly.  Instead of saying “I can’t do what Josh does” say instead, “how much of what Josh is doing can I do now, and how can I improve my current ability?”

Given that objective, let’s examine what Josh does.  A score of 27 for Cindy means Josh does almost 7 reps every 5 minutes.  That’s helpful, but let’s break it down a bit: a score of 27 for 20 minutes mean one rep every .74 minutes,  which we could round up to .75, which means 1 rep every 3/4 of a minute, or 1 rep every 45 seconds.

So by that standard if I can do sets of 5 kipping pullups and 10 pushups and 15 air squats in 45 seconds on average, I’m as fit as Josh! Well, not quite — I would have to continue that progress for 20 minutes (which isn’t likely in the foreseeable future.)  So let’s be pragmatic, and establish a starting goal of doing 1 rep every 45 seconds for 5 minutes.

As it so happens I did 5 minutes of Cindy recently, and it took me 5:15 to do 5 reps.  So right now I’m quite a ways off — at 1 rep every 63 seconds.  Which is 18 seconds off the mark per set.  Plus I was doing knee pushups.  But let’s put that aside and assume that being able to do 7 rounds of Cindy in 5 minutes (actually about 6 full rounds and 30 seconds left) with knee pushups is a good start.  And for me it would be.  As it so happens the first set I did came in at 44 seconds.

I think 5 minutes of 45 second sets of Cindy is something I can accomplish.  The pullups and squats I can do — it’s the pushups that really slow me down.  After the third round I start to fade really fast.  I end up doing 3 at a time, then 2, then 1.  Slowly.  So I need to improve on pushups.

If I get to my goal of 7 sets of Cindy in 5 minutes scaled with knee pushups, I’ll try 10 minutes.  And if I get that far, I’ll try full pushups for 5 minutes.  And etc.

Will this make me as fit as Josh Stonier? Not exactly.  It will mean that I am as fit as Josh for 5 minutes.  I’m OK with that.  At least for now.

Cheers!

As a general proposition “VO2 Max” ought not to play a particular role in anyone’s happiness.  But it does for me.

Establishing a VO2 Max has been on my list of things to do for a couple of weeks.  It’s not complicated: row 2000m as fast as you can and plug in the numbers.  There are other ways to establish a VO2 Max; for professionals a lab test would be the best bet.  But for my purposes a simple approximation would do just fine.

The idea behind getting a VO2 Max established is to measure progress.  It’s a straightforward way to measure cardiovascular fitness.  So keep it simple, right? Just get on a rower and go for it.  Which I did.  But leading up to it — for a couple of days — I was worried.  As in suffering angst.  As in having an attachment to an outcome and being unhappy about something that had not even occurred.

Anyway I set aside some time today and did the row.  I assumed I would come in above eight minutes, but I wanted to come in as close to eight as possible.  Why? Because I had plugged numbers into the calculator and had a pre-conceived notion of where I wanted to be.  Not very indicative of Dharma-mind.  Nope.

But I did the row and I came in at 8:47, which I was happy with.  That calculates out to be 43.67 for someone my size and level of training.  For my age, it’s considered excellent. The VO2 max for the average male on a college track team is 48-53.  I happen to think I’ve got a lot of upside in me, so I’m expecting to get a little closer to high forties.

I am however concerned about the emotional attachment to the outcome.  Lots of inner work yet to be done.

A while back I did 5 rounds of 1 arm 3 KB snatches + 5 half-height kb swings, 10 24 inch box jumps (first the right arm, 10 box jumps, then left arm, then 10 box jumps) and a 200m run.  Total time was 17:30 (which I mistakenly wrote down as 16:30.)  Not a bad time, but I saw lots of 15 minute times.  It was a tough slog (in 100 d heat too.)  The 200m runs were the toughest.  I just could not get going.  I wasn’t running, I was shuffling at a brisk pace.

A few days after that I decided I needed to approach stamina training with some planning.  I set a goal of being able to row 500m in 1:40 (which is 100 seconds.)  Not easy, but possible.  When I first stated tracking my row times, I was at 2:07 for 500m.  Then I got to 1:57.  The best time so far is 1:56.  I had been doing 250m rows with a goal of keeping the pace at sub 1:50, which I can do.  I even got down to sub 1:40 a couple of times. If I could keep that up for 500m I’d be at my goal. Anyway a one second improvement counts.

Last week I wanted to try a variation of Cindy (which is 5 kipping pullups, 10 pushups, and 15 squats — max number of rounds for 20 minutes.) My previous best was 11 1/2; competent athletes are doing 20 or more (which is 1 round per minute or better.)  I decided I would reduce the intensity by doing push-ups from the knees instead of the full body version.  And I would only do 5 rounds for time; I figured I would come in near 5 minutes.  No.  It was 6:39.  Which comes down to 2  1/2 second per rep as opposed to 2 seconds.

Next workout I did a WOD that had 30-20-10 of jumping lunges, 20# dumbbell push presses (Rx was 30) and abmat situps.  So a total of 180 reps.  I noticed several 5 minute times on the board, and 1 sub-five minute time.  My time was 7:40.

My point about all this is that my stamina — which is to say my ability to bring a steady level of effort to bear on the work — is not where I would like it to be.  I can feel myself fading — a good analogy would be “the wind going out of my sails.”  I’m making some headway (no pun?) but I think I need more focus on endurance exercises.  By “endurance” I mean high intensity over shorter time spans, not “marathon” efforts.

The other consideration here is injury.  I had actually stayed away from CF for about two weeks because my shoulder felt like someone had hit it with a mallet.  I went to the doctor, had some X-rays, but no apparent injury was detected (at least to the bone.)  But it hurt.  So I was careful to avoid anything that would aggravate the problem.  It seems to have worked, insofar as the recent dumb-bell presses didn’t cause any noticeable problems.

So: stamina, injuries — what to do? My solution is to start focusing on rowing, along with basic high intensity body-weight exercises, and get way serious about flexibility.

Regarding flexibility, as near as I can tell the squat is probably the most fundamental movement one can engage in.  The better the squat, the stronger the potential for strength.  When I say “squat” I mean getting all the way into it: full-depth butt-to-calves.  The other flexibility exercise I want to focus on is the bridge.

In other words I need to revisit all the basic stuff that I started to ignore because it wasn’t glamorous enough to satisfy my ego.

I’ve been involved with CrossFit for about 18 months.  It has been slow going.  Sometimes it seems like there aren’t any big improvements.  But a couple of weeks back I did 100 double-unders.  It took a while, especially since I alternate single and doubles (and I was doing sets of 10), but I did it.  That same week I practiced kettle-bell swings with a 70# kettlebell. At the Newbie Throwdown I failed at a 115# thruster, but I did manage to get the bar into a rack position — so a 115# clean, which was way more then I could do last year.

A few days back I read something about VO2, which is a measure of how much oxygen a person is using under physical stress.  As I understand it VO2 is the single most important measurement of fitness (sort of like my Felsted measurement, but scientific.)  There are several VO2 calculators out there, and my scores were in the OK or average range (about 39.)  There are actually a few ways to test VO2 in a formal way.

In any case increasing VO2 is not exactly a mystery: work harder at running, rowing etc.  So I decided I would to go into the gym earlier and do some extra rowing, running or whatever.  And perhaps most importantly, I decided I would have to go all out on those extra rows and runs, forget about failure, give it everything and not worry about what comes next.  The trick is to get past the inertia.

The first day back I went to the gym a bit early, and rowed 500m in 2:05, which is substantially better then the 2:20 I’m used to seeing.  Today I ran 800 meters in 3:38.  I ran on a flat surface, and the first 400 was at 1:30, so my performance deteriorated, but still it’s a good time for me.  I think I could get to a real 8 minute run with a little more work.  I think a 7 minute mile is within reach as well.

Today’s workout was a tough one.  The 800m run left me tired.  The warmup was 3x of 10 air squats, 10 pullups, 10 bar dips, and 15 hollow rocks.  Then the workout: 2x 15 burpees, 20 pushups, 25 kettlebell swings, 30 situps, and 35 double unders.  I knew it was going to be a long haul.  It was: 22 minutes plus. I decided I would Rx it, so I used a 44# kb, did everything as prescribed.  I also knew the 44# kb would slow me down, and it did, as I was only able to get a 10 rep set once, and all the rest were 5 rep sets, then a few seconds of rest.  But I’m sure I met the objectives of the workout; at the end I was exhausted.  My time was slow, but I got 100% of that workout.

So the plan is simple: increase VO2 by doing extras of rowing and running and keeping the times as fast as possible, and stepping up the pace in the WODs. Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? 🙂

Cheers.

A couple of weeks back our CF gym (CrossFit East Sacramento) had the annual “Newbie Throwdown.”   The idea is to have all the newer members, and essentially anyone who is not at level 1 status, participate.  The level 1 athletes act as coach/captain.   It’s an all-day event, 3 WODs plus a floater WOD.

As it so happens I’m in my 2nd year at CFES, but I haven’t taken the level 1 test so I’m still in what is referred to as “Foundations.”  So I still qualify as a “newbie.” So I decided to sign up.  But I admit I had mixed feelings about participating.

The first thing that gave me a bit of a problem is that there is quite a bit of a lead up to the event.  Lots of time to dwell on it and get nervous.  Secondly, unlike regular WODs, these events don’t offer much of a chance to scale.  There is some leeway, a bit of wiggle room sometimes, but not much.  So failure has a larger, uglier face. But I signed up anyway.

The WODS were announced a few days before the event.  The first one was a 400m row, 30x 80lb sandbag squat, 30 lateral burpees over a 16 inch bar, and 30 GHD situps requiring touching a medicine ball, and a final 400m run.  Frankly I didn’t think I could do the 30 squats.  I was part of a four person team, and it was decided I would go first (the assumption being I would be the slowest.)

The good news is the 30 sandbag squats were not that hard, and I kept a steady pace during the whole WOD.  I came in at about 13: 40 for total time, which is the bad news because that is really too slow.  We ended up being the last team to finish (total time of 19 minutes or so.)  My feeling is that had I been able to shave a couple of minutes off my time we would have come in near the top.

The second WOD was a thruster ladder, starting with 95#, then 115#, 125 etc. I knew I could do 95#, but had some doubts about 115#.  I did the 95#, but couldn’t do 115#.

The third WOD was a 400m run, then max reps for: 20# wall ball throws, double unders, 30# db ground-to-overhead (i.e, a 30 db snatch),  jumping pullups, 6 foot wall climbs, and row for calories.  2 rounds, 45 seconds on, 15 seconds off.  If that sounds like a lot of intense work, it is.  Bruising too — the 6 ft. wall climbs were brutal on the forearms.  The wall balls were difficult, I’m not good at double unders, and I was easily the slowest runner.  I did OK at jumping pullups, and wall climbs.

At one point our team was 4th (out of 12 teams) then 5th, and finally 6th overall. At the end of the day I was really tired, and mentally worn out.  I saw quite a few really great efforts.  Lots of very strong, very fit people were competing.

The upshot of all this is that guys who outweigh me by 40 to 100 lbs not only out-lift me, they outrun me.   By quite a bit.  And many (if not most) of the women out-lifted me and out ran me as well.  All in all it’s a bit aggravating.

Now somewhere somebody is going to say, but it’s not about competing with other people, it’s about competing with yourself.  The idea being that it’s all about doing your best, getting PRs, and participating.  The problem with that sentiment is that it’s confusing “fitness” with “performance.”  I could be totally fit and still have a poor performance relative to my peers.

Next someone will say well that’s the problem with CrossFit it’s competitive.  And my response is that so is life, except for those who don’t have to compete, or those who choose not to.

In any case I signed up, I accepted the danger, I knew it would be tough, I knew the people participating were stronger — so why bother?  That’s a good question, and it’s really at the heart of the conversation.

In the end I guess I felt like I owed to myself to get in there and take the physical, mental, and emotional pain and make the best of it.  No PRs, nothing exceptional, I did as well as I could on that day at that time in that place.

Today I noticed that Chris Spealler came in 44th (huh?! 44th? yes) at the first event in the CrossFit 2012 games.  I’ve read Spealler is a great athlete — among the elite super-fit.  No doubt he expected to do better.  Of course he has quite a bit more potential for upside than I do, but that’s beside the point.  He didn’t quit, he’s ready for the next day, he’ll keep going.

Whether I sign up for another competition is an open question.  Maybe I will, maybe not.  In any case managing ego, expectations, fear, and risk is all part of CrossFit.  Sometimes that means not having as good a performance as one would like to have.  It reminds me of life.

Cheers.

I really enjoy CrossFit.  This week I took a little time off to learn more about Olympic lifting, and I didn’t devote as much time to the typical workouts.  And I can feel it.  I did not get my hormonal adrenaline hypothalamic fear factor flight/or/fight stimulus (I just made all that up.)  So I’m not quite as settled as I normally am at this point in the week (that’s the true part.)

Anyway I had a chance to browse some other blogs and review some comments about CrossFit.  Mostly negative comments, the gist of which is that CrossFit is ill-conceived as exercise regime because it’s dangerous — the movements are too fast, are done with poor form, and too often.  Various people (e.g., Drew Baye) insist there are safer alternatives that offer superior benefits.

With respect to the dangers of CrossFit, I’ve covered that in various other posts.  With respect to whether there are better alternatives, here is what I insist: that CrossFit is open to anything, and if there are better methods you’ll see them adopted by CrossFit coaches.

Frankly I’m not in a position to argue about the mechanics of one exercise vs. another.  But there is something I can comment on, and that’s my experience working out at a CrossFit gym, and that’s what this blog series is about.

From now on, if anybody asks me “what is CrossFit” or “do you recommend CrossFit” here is my answer.  CrossFit is a recreational activity with a strong emphasis on physical culture, e.g. “fitness.”  CrossFit compares to water skiing, snow skiing, skateboarding, rock climbing, snow boarding, body surfing, surfing, rollerblading, and sky-diving.  I’m guessing most people know what those activities are,  and will immediately understand the level of athletic ability required, as well as the potential dangers.

CrossFit claims to be “the sport of fitness,” not an exercise program.  Like any sport, it requires diligence and commitment.  It has a set of core ideas, and a particular approach.  CrossFit, as a recreational activity and sport, requires risk management.  My experience is that CF is exactly what it claims to be.

Do I recommend CrossFit? Absolutely.  The benefits are huge.  But if the definition of “exercise” precludes injury, CrossFit is not exercise.  So I will concede that point to Drew Baye, Anthony Dream Johnson, and Micheal Allen Smith.  For me CrossFit is fun, enjoyable, and has lots of benefits.  If someone wants to enjoy CrossFit as an activity, or sport, then I recommend it. And CrossFit can be modified to allow anyone to participate.

Next week: back to WOD.

Cheers.

CrossFit is, at it’s essence, simple: vary the exercises so you use every possible muscle in every practical way imaginable, and make the workout short and intense.  As far as  I know, there is no core set of CrossFit exercises.  There are what are called “named WODs”, and these are put in practice to form a common language of measurement.  At CFES we don’t often do the named WODs.  The reason being that CrossFit avoids repetition.

The other day our WOD was 15 minutes of max reps with a partner: 400m row, 10 pullups and as many box jumps as possible after the pullups.  Between the two of us we did 100 box jumps (I used a 20 inch tire.)  I did not regard the workout as particularly dangerous.   The vast majority of the CF workouts I do are like that.

Today I did some Olympic weight training.  I used a 33# bar, which briefly went up to 55#.  I did some snatches, some back squats, some presses.  We also did quite a bit of stretching and warming up.

In every CrossFit workout I’ve done I am the person who selects the weight or box height or whatever, and regulates the intensity.  In CrossFit, we call this “scaling.”  The idea is to scale the weight down (or up) so that the workout is intense enough to be of benefit.  In practice you will see vastly different weight levels used, but if you look closely you will see that everybody gets about the same level of intensity.

This single concept of scaling is key to CrossFit, and yet when I look at blogs saying CrossFit is dangerous, they completely ignore scaling.  So Anthony Johnson and Drew Baye for example (“CrossFit™ : A 100% Chance of Injury?” and “CrossFit” respectively) never mention (when discussing CrossFit) that the key to CrossFit is selecting the appropriate level of weight (or box, or kettlebell, or jump-rope, etc.)  And that is assuming that weights are used, which in my experience is not that often (I’m referring to Olympic weight lifting exercises.)

Interesting enough, Baye is a high intensity training (HIT) instructor.  CrossFit is all about high intensity, but Baye’s argument is apparently with the way the Oly lifts are performed in CF (e.g., at “high speed”, which is a question of scaling.)  He also says (rather ironically) that no one needs to do Olympic lifting at all, because most people “don’t need explosive power.”  I think that’s a very subjective statement — who says “most people” don’t need explosive power? I hold the opinion most people would benefit hugely from having explosive power.  For me, that’s part of fitness.  When you look at Baye’s core exercises, they include Olympic lifting. [Note: please see the comments section for some corrections to the above points — 6/23/12 SC]

Neither Baye or Johnson supplied any particular objective evidence to support their assertions.  Johnson’s premise is that CrossFit is too risky, and is therefore irrational. Well, I scale every WOD and keep myself from getting hurt.  Baye (apparently) simply doesn’t like the idea that the exercises are so random, and the Olympic lifting is done (occasionally) in a timed situation.  But nobody said anything like “to be a member of our exclusive circle you have to move X object in Y timeframe.”  In fact what they say is lower the weight until you can do the routine safely and effectively.

What people are encouraged to do is get to their peak level of fitness, and get beyond where they are today.

The other big thing that I think needs to be said again is this: CrossFit is exercise agnostic.  If it turns out Baye, Johnson, et al are correct about the particulars of any given exercise being unsafe, or a better choice, then CrossFit will adapt.  CrossFit is about managing fitness, and therefore is open to any method.

Cheers.