Back squats and a fun wod!

Last night at SICFIT we worked on back squats. I am starting to love that little garage and everything about it, including the fact that I may have just showered upon entering only to leave covered head to foot in dirt. My neighbors have been asking me what in the world I get myself into on Monday and Wednesday nights because I always come home with dirt streaks, blackened knees and plastered hair. Beautiful. The concrete floor without black mats just adds to the rough around the edges feel of the place. It's great!

I wouldn't describe my back squats as great though, I'm always a little worried I'm going to decapitate myself. I think my dislike of them started with a wod including a run and 95# BS reps and its been growing ever since.
5x5 BS 95, 115, 125, 135, 140 (scratch at rep 3, finished the last two reps at 135).
My BS 1RM is 145# and I only got through that last set with an awesome spotter, Karen! She deserves a huge congrats because she was like a different person last night with a killer snatch and PR on back squats. She made Oly Lifting look easy!

This morning Zach's 5:30 am coed class did this:
1000m row
30 thrusters 65/95#
50 American swings 16kg/1.5 pood

I deleted my Twitter account so I didn't know the wod beforehand. It looked like fun, I'm a fan of thrusters and swings and I've been eyeing that 1.5 pood for awhile so I asked Zach if I could scale the wod up! I chose 75# for the thrusters and a 20kg and both felt like challenging weights for me. Finished in 11:41, not even close to top 3 but I'm really happy with how that wod was programmed and how everything felt! My new goal is to use a heavier KB whenever the 16kg is prescribed for women.

Total change of subject but tomorrow at work we're having a baby shower and I really want to continue my clean eating. What are some good ideas of a paleo dish I could bring that makes a lot of food without taking that much time? Everyone else is signed up for chips, cake, pasta salad type stuff and I need to bring something that will satisfy me (and maybe encourage some co-workers to eat something healthy!). Thanks for your help!

Week 1 at SICFIT Austin

SICFIT Austin is now open! It is a small garage gym a couple blocks south on Burnet from CFC. If you guys go looking for it, look for the Texas Hydroponics sign because there isn't a SICIFT Austin banner up yet. I told Zach I could make something pretty sweet for them - I'm thinking hot pink with some swirls, hearts and stars. Maybe some glitter. He said no.

When I got home from work before my first class I was feeling a little down. I thought I would be missing out on doing FGB with my girls because I love Crystal's 6:45 class a lot! My expectations of SICFIT Austin was that it was going to be a class full of seasoned crossfitters, mainly guys that could deadlift 400#. I didn't know what I was getting myself into!

I popped my Muscle Strength and Catalyst like a good #AdvocareAddict and trotted myself over to the gym only to find out... I am SICFIT Austin's first client! Coaches Zach, Winchester and Big Mike were there trying out the equipment and doing a wod of deadlifts, push presses and muscle ups. There were also 2 crossfitters from Chicago that were jumping in and Bekah, Mike's girlfriend was hanging out. The garage has a great, no-nonsense vibe to it and I can already tell that a lot of progress is going to happen in there!

Class began with Zach putting me through a brand new warm up and Winchester shadowing/videoing with his new flip cam. I can't wait to check out that video! The warm up is completely different from Central's - it didn't have any of the high knees, fast feet agility type stuff but more of getting your shoulders warm, legs loosened up. I don't remember all of it but we did about a 400m sprint to start, then jumping jacks, arm circles, donkey kicks, leg swings, hopscotch, a variety of push ups, and squats. Whew, I was like, "I'm sweating and we haven't even touched a barbell yet."

To be honest, I don't really like Oly lifting. That's why I signed up to do Zach's seminar and that lead into SICFIT Austin because I'm really bad at it. CrossFit teaches us to work on your weaknesses and I'm trying to chip away at mine. What I do appreciate about Oly lifting is that it teaches you such GREAT body awareness. I really try to get in tune with my body placement, how deep my knees are bent, if my core is engaged, where my shoulders are leveraged. The next thing we did in class after the warm up (or it kind of was still in the warm up) was PVC pipe work. The PVC pipe is where all the body awareness begins. I need to feel the hamstring stretch and the locked out position on top and it's great to learn this with a PVC pipe instead of a 45# barbell. There are so many smaller movements in Burgener's Warm Up that I have to be self aware because fixing the slightest body placement could give me that much more power in a lift.

From there, we grabbed a barbell and Zach lead us through progressions with the hang snatch. I've been working with him for more than a month now on Oly lifting and I could really feel my progress with the snatch. I wasn't nearly as uncomfortable as when I started with the weight overhead. It felt good but I still need to work on keeping the bar close to the body and pulling myself under it faster. Sometimes I get frustrated with all of the things to think about before a lift but Mike gave great cues of when I fixed something or when a lift looked a little better. I liked the combination of Zach and Mike as coaches. Zach is great at getting me fired up to be more aggressive and he's so knowledgeable about the breakdown of the movements to improve your technique.

On Wednesday, I was joined by Sally and Karen. I think Sally will be with me once a week and Karen still needs to sign up! I'm still surprised that SICFIT Austin isn't sold out with a bunch of muscle-y guys, who would have guessed that girls would fill the classes first? We went through the same extended warm up while Zach made female jokes, cursed his allergies, and told us to be more aggressive. He's a winner, I'm telling ya.

We worked on the first two pulls for the snatch. Pull number one is off the ground and it's slow and steady. When I watch videos/people of this first pull I'm like, "Why are they going so slow, how in the world are they going to get that overhead??" But it's supposed to be slow until the bar reaches the knee where the second pull of the shrug happens. I think, "Slow, slow, slow, SHRUG!" and I better freaking explode with as much power as possible or else Zach is there to call me out! First we did it with the bar, then 65#, 75# and finally 95#. 95# felt SO heavy and it was really hard for me to be explosive with that weight.

All in all, I'm really excited that I tried something new this month. It's really cool to be a part of the beginning stages of SICFIT Austin and see all the potential of what's to come. The coaches are awesome, the vibe is great for hitting goals and the small garage gym is going to be a huge success!

Pictures

In the past few days I have found a few pictures that really stopped my day and made me think. Unfortunately I can't find the first one I wanted to share. It was in the news links on sicfit.com but Web must have already taken it down. The picture showed a pair of hands that had been battered by gymnastics. I complain about rips and blisters all the time but as soon as this picture loaded all I could do was say, "Wow". It represented so much dedication and hardship.

The second is a series of pictures that Mel linked on Twitter. It's a photo journal of a woman's fight against breast cancer.



(Regrave) <--- The whole story can be viewed there.


The third picture is more fun! I have printed this out and it is now in my workout log and on my vision board! I love it!




"The pain ends but the beauty remains" -Renoir

Weekend Discoveries

Jess K, Linds and I decided to kill our TeamLLcoolJ blog. It had a good run and we'll always be TeamLLcoolJ in spirit, just now not in blog form.

Anywhoo, I was going to post this over there but now I'm back here. I know, it's a tough life. But! I am about to reward my faithful readers (all 2 of you...) with some top secret information that I discovered this weekend!

#1 What do you get when you combine two of the most amazing paleo foods? Bacon + Kale = BACALE! This is my new favorite dish EVER!

Yum yum, here's how I did it:
1. Buy nitrate free bacon pieces and the curliest kale you can find. Curly kale is what makes it!
2. Throw the bacon into the skillet first, it needs more time to cook than kale.
3. As the bacon starts cooking and the fat rendering, tear the kale from it's stalk in bite size pieces and add to skillet.
4. Stir all the bacon fat into the kale. You can add some pepper to taste but it's pretty good as is too. Cook until kale browns a tinge and bacon looks nice and crispy.

#2 My second discovery is not really mine. Carey Kepler gave a great talk about cleansing and it inspired me to go buy a blender which I was somehow living this long without. I didn't want to make a fruit smoothie because I'm laying off the fruit so I made a smoothie out of: spinach, carrots, 1 egg, coconut oil, mint, and lemon. It sounds so gross and I was just throwing random stuff from my refrig in there but it tasted so good! I think it was the lemon that made it. I'm going to call these my Willy Nilly smoothies where anything goes!


Good luck to the Spartan and Trojans this weekend!

Post from Chad Dougherty

WHAT'S THE POINT?
Chad Dougherty, CFAI Trainer


It's hard. It's heavy. It's 5 am and the alarm is letting you know the suck fest is about to start all over. The last six months have been a blur. It started with your best friend from college calling about his new fitness program and how you had to get on board. "Remember college, when we could both run a 23 minute 5k? He said, "This stuff will bring you back. Plus, it will make you look like a stud again". So you sign up at your local "CrossFit" gym. It's been a good six months. Your "Fran" time has gone from 13:49 with the bar and jumping pull-ups, to 8:30 as Rx'd. Pretty cool. You can dead lift your bodyweight and look and feel great, but don't realize it. You've started to wonder why you go. What's the point? Your not 21 again, your still carrying around half of your old gut. You work this hard and you're still not ripped? You feel like hitting the snooze button and going back to bed. Stop, and take inventory. You've forgotten about the heartburn, it's gone. Winded at the top of the stairs? No. You're picking the kids up and throwing them around like the "good old days". Your blood pressure has dropped a bit, and you can play basketball with the kids until they want to stop. Health happens when you're not looking. It sneaks up on you because you've already forgotten what it was like before. You felt dull, slow, and weak, with unexplained physical ailments. But now you've become a "CrossFitter". You're already better than college, because now you have a 21 minute 5k, and you can do 20 pull ups. You've discovered it's about more than looks, it's about longevity. It's about the daily tasks that have become easy. It's about your perception of life, it's curiously better. You continue for all the things you want to have happen, but haven't. You've tapped into the unforeseen, or better yet, you understand the possibilities. You are one of the fortunate few. Now it's up to you. You're strong. You're fast. You've already changed your life, and the lives around you. You can continue at the current pace and get a little fitter, stronger, and faster each day. Or you can step it up and realize changes you only hoped for. A little more pain, a little more tolerance to that pain. You change your diet. You get enough rest. You fill the holes in your technique. This is your world. Go get it. Is 60% enough? Maybe. Is 80% better? Yes. Have you given enough? You tell me. Let's light it up.

Deadlifts

"There is no such thing as a self-made man. We are made up of thousands of others. Every one who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the make-up of our character and of our thoughts, as well as our success."
- George Matthew Adams

Last week's DL set
3 x 3
155/175/185

This week's DL set
3 x 5
175/185 (2 rep-fail)/175

Hmm... looks like some tweaking needs to be done.

One tip I want to remember is from Coach Zach. During the 3x3 set he said I need to lead with my shoulders, and not have the first body part to move be my rear. Shoulders bring the rest of the body up. I hope I have that tip right. I tried to think of that during the 3x5 set.

Angie 3/29

I've been blogging more over at

www.thosecrazygirls.wordpress.com

so you should check out TeamLLcoolJ when "Lory's Adventures" runs really dry. Linds wrote a great post about her Angie experience and I didn't want to double team that hoe (Angie, that is, not Linds) so I'm going to record my benchmark over here just so I can look back as needed.

My previous January Angie:
75 kipping pull ups
40 push ups on toes
60 push ups on knees
100 sit ups
100 squats

This time around I started with sit ups and got through those unbroken. Then, it was 100 squats and I wanted to speed through these because I knew I would need a lot of time for pull ups. Squats weren't unbroken, I think I stopped around 50 and then at 80 to shake it out. Next time I'm shooting for unbroken squats to go along with my sit ups (that'll be a nice pair).

100 pull ups!! I've heard horror stories of the rips we acquire from pull ups with Angie so going into it I was worried about my hands. But I taped up and was strategizing for sets of 5. I ended up with the beginning sets being of 7, then did a bunch at 5, and then pull ups in reps of 2, then 1... The ones at the end were questionable about my chin getting over the bar but all in all they felt pretty good. Ended up with a little blood and 2 blisters but not close to some bad tears I've gotten in the past.

As Barbara mentioned in a recent post, a lot times in CrossFit we experience 2 steps forward, 1 step back. As good as my pull ups felt, I had expired so much energy on them that my push ups were lacking. I reeeeeally wanted to stay on my toes so I could officially say that I did Angie as prescribed but I wasn't getting full range of motion and I was just failing at every push up when I got to around the 50 rep mark. The new coach, Lauren (who is awesome!) talked to me afterwards about core strength and how if I keep everything tight then the power will come from my core and not my arms so plank holds are definitely in order! My arms were just absolutely cashed.

In summary, my March Angie was:
100 kipping pull ups
60 push ups on toes
40 push ups on knees
100 sit ups
100 squats
20:52